Interview (Part 5): Craig Mazin
Craig Mazin is a successful screenwriter in the comedy genre whose movie credits include RocketMan (1997), Scary Movie 3 (2003), Scary Movie 4 (2006), Superhero Movie (2008), The Hangover Part II (2011), Identity Thief (2013) and The Hangover Part III (2013). With fellow screenwriter Ted Elliott, he hosted the informative writing blog “The Artful Writer” from 2004–2011. Currently Craig and screenwriter John August co-host the popular weekly podcast Scriptnotes for which the pair recently celebrated their 100th recording.
I recently spoke with Craig about his background, some of his writing projects, the state of the movie business and the screenwriting craft. Today in Part 5, Craig discusses “The Artful Writer” blog, the Scriptnotes podcast series, and the state of comedy in the movie business:
Scott: I’d like to talk about your social media life. You started a blog on screenwriting, “The Artful Writer” in 2004, which is pretty early on in the history of blogging and kept that up until about 2011. What was the impetus for that?
Craig: Around 2004, I became friendly with Ted Elliott, who’s a great screenwriter. Ted, in addition to having co‑written some of the biggest hits in film history, also possesses a remarkable mind. He taught me so much about the way our union works and the way unions work in general, contracts, and the like. He was very influential on me. Most writers at the time were moving around in a state of general ignorance about the forces that controlled so much of their business, their profession. When we created that blog, my job was to make things…how should I put it? It was to explain things. I started the blog to explain things to writers. How do residuals work, what are separated rights, what is a collective bargaining agreement, credits, everything. We just started explaining all of this stuff because the more we know, the more powerful we are and the less we know, the easier it is to manipulate us.
The blog motored along quite happily for quite some time. Then, the strike happened and it went nuts for a while.
Scott: Your original target was working writers?
Craig: Yeah, that’s right.
Scott: Then it expanded to aspiring writers.
Craig: Right, and I was surprised initially that anyone cared other than professional writers about how health and pension worked, but they did and I was happy to have them. Very occasionally I would talk about craft things. Mostly it was the business of writing. The intention was always for professional writers.
Scott: How did you intersect with John August?
Craig: John had his site, and it seems a little crazy to think of now in 2013 when everyone including toddlers has their own website. But at the time, in the mid 2000s if you wanted to read from a professional screenwriter’s blog, there weren’t too many of them. His was the most prominent, I would think. There was the “The Artful Writer” and a few others here and there, but we were basically the only games in town. We shared the same agent and we were friendly. Around the time I started running out of steam and not really wanting to write anymore for the blog he called me up and said, “Hey, do you want to do a podcast?”
And I was like “Oh my god, yes. Yes. Yes, I do. I don’t want to write about this stuff anymore. I would love to just talk about it.” And so it began.
Scott: That’s Scriptnotes. I think you’re coming up on your 100th episode of the podcast here soon.
Craig: We are. Right before this conversation, we recorded our 97th. Our 98th is already in the can, I believe, so we’re coming up on our 100th. I have to say, the response to it has been remarkable and wonderful. I get better reviews for my podcasting than I do for my screenplays, and I’m okay with that. I’m very happy with it and I think there’s a wonderful community that’s been built around it. I can’t wrap my mind around its popularity sometimes because John and I just do it. It’s like having a phone conversation just like this one.
We just have a phone conversation. Every now and then he calls me up and says, “Did you know that 200,000 people listen to that?” Then my heart starts to pound a little bit because that’s very nerve-wracking for me. I don’t like that, but I get over it.
He said that when the tickets went on sale for the 100th episode, they sold out in three minutes. So I feel like Bon Jovi today, very fabulous.
Scott: A couple of questions related to the state of screenwriting. Comedy and movies. Given the internationalization of Hollywood movies, there seems to be this conventional wisdom that comedies don’t travel as well as action, thriller, action‑thriller, or science fiction. What’s your take on that?
Craig: It’s not true. It’s just true sometimes. I can’t figure out exactly when it is true and when it isn’t. The scary movies traveled great, maybe because they were really physical, maybe because the movies they were spoofing had traveled. Horrible Bosses traveled great, Identity Thief did not. Hangover 2 and Hangover 3 traveled awesome. Talladega Nights, no. I can’t figure it out. Some movies just seem to grip people overseas and some not as much. And I don’t think that’s only true for comedy.
Scott: One thing that I’ve tracked in terms of spec sales is that comedy had always been number one for years and years, and now it’s fallen in the last two years. I think action and thriller are the two top, so it’s seemingly had an impact on the number of comedies they’ve been greenlighting.
Craig: They make many fewer movies now. I think that’s what that’s a function of. The business contracted. When home video, the DVD market essentially, began its 40-year collapse, the studios responded by cutting the amount of movies they made by a third. In doing so, they had choices to make about which genres they cut more, “Do we cut across the board, do we cut certain genres more?” It seems like they’ve been erring towards producing the spectacle movie, movies that they feel people are compelled to see in theaters. They’ve been erring towards these giant 200+ million dollar spectacles.
Some have been very profitable for them, some have been disasters for them. It always seems to me that in the end, you can’t avoid the fact that making movies is a dice roll. You just can’t avoid it. It’s been nice to see quite a few comedies doing really well, actually.
I think that you’ll be seeing more and more of them. Comedy appears to be holding up in the marketplace more robustly, at least in my perception, than a lot of other genres.
Scott: There does seem to be a renaissance of sorts or maybe the front edge of it. Especially with action‑comedies, which we haven’t seen as much of compared to the 80s and 90s. But do you think with the current success of The Heat we might see more?
Craig: I think it comes and goes. There’ve always been movies like that. In the 80s there were a ton of movies like The Heat. Kevin Smith recently made Cop Out with Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan. That didn’t work. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. The genre itself isn’t new or old, there’s just a magic in the casting and also just a well‑written script and a movie that looks funny to people. Obviously Melissa, she’s part of that. She’s a real movie star now. She’s awesome. I can’t think of anyone who deserves it more. She’s a terrific, terrific actor.
I would say that the modern audience seems far less married to genre than movie critics. Movie critics love talking about genre and they get really antsy when they feel like a movie is a fish with feathers. That used to be the case with the audience too. That they wanted to know, “What the hell is that I’m watching here. Is it a comedy? Is it a drama? Is it an action movie, is it not?”
Lately it seems like the audience has become far more flexible, and if anything they almost appreciate a certain audacity of genre bending. We’ll see if that holds true.
Tomorrow in Part 6, Craig delves into key aspects of the craft of screenwriting.
For Part 1, go here.
Part 2, go here.
Part 3, go here.
Part 4, go here.
Craig is repped by CAA.
Twitter: @clmazin.