You know, I completely forgot about this, from a recent interview (here or here) with Stephen Gaghan:

One of Gaghan's anecdotes from the early days of his career finds him in a restaurant with a screenwriter friend. The friend has Gaghan's Frasier spec in front of him. With a “withering look of contempt” on his face, Charlie Kaufman asks Gaghan: “Why did you write this?”. He then proceeds to rip the script apart. Gaghan says he benefitted enormously from Kaufman's critique.

Thanks to Ismo, who pointed that stuff out to me a couple weeks ago.

Gaghan (who wrote Traffic, in case you were wondering) recounted that anecdote much earlier, too:

“I tried to write a movie for Bill Murray. I tried to break into TV sitcoms. I tried everything. None of it worked, primarily because I didn't know what I was doing. One day I met Charlie Kaufman (writer of “Being John Malkovich”), who was languishing on a sitcom, and he went through one of my scripts with me.

“Up until this moment everyone had said the same thing to me — “This is great; you're really talented.” And I believed them. I didn't know that saying you like something is a cop-out — that it's much easier to . . . give encouragement than real criticism, which takes time and thought.

“Charlie's first question was, “Why did you write this?” followed by, “What is the point of this?” He just calmly eviscerated it.

“I had been whiny and expected a break to be handed to me. I thought I was on the five-yard line but hadn't even gotten on the field. I knew I could either quit or start over. I threw out everything I'd written in the last two years and started again. The pitfall is believing that you're good before you're any good.”

In other news, there are dozens of bats cavorting among the trees in my backyard. Pray that I am not bitten on the nose and that I do not go on a rabies-inspired rampage. That is all. Thank-you and goodnight.