Scriptnotes Podcast

John and Craig go back to the beginning to examine the mechanics of the flash-forward opening — or as it’s known on this podcast, the “Stuart Special.” They look at what makes a strong flash-forward, when to avoid them, and how to pay back the narrative debt they incur. We also follow up on the Scriptnotes survey and answer a massive grab-bag blitz of listener questions including the potential pitfalls of child protagonists, “unfilmable” elements, and how to end a scene. In our bonus segment for premium members, how do you socialize at Hollywood parties? We’ve made all the mistakes so you don’t have to. Links: The script for episode one of Chernobyl Scriptnotes episode 493: Opening Scenes Greta Gerwig’s Little Women screenplay The Sheep Detectives Scriptnotes episode 731: Avoidance and Other Anti-Quests Sorkinisms – A Supercut by Kevin T. Porter My journey to the microwave alternate timeline by Malmesbury Solasta 2 Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book! Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt! Check out the Inneresting Newsletter Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube Follow Scriptnotes on Instagram and TikTok John August on Bluesky and Instagram Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!) Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Email us at [email protected] Full Episode Transcript: Teaser Prologue Scriptnotes Survey Follow-Up Stuart Specials Listener Questions One Cool Thing How to Behave at Hollywood Parties Teaser Craig Mazin: The reason I don’t like this producer is because they’re doing this thing that makes me insane, which is to elevate their personal issue to an industry-wide rule that does not exist. It is an appeal to authority they do not have, or rather, it’s an assumption of authority they do not have, and they are inviting people to just throw a wadded-up poster of Home Alone in their face. I shall do so virtually. Prologue ↑ Back to Top John August: 30 minutes earlier. Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig: My name is Craig Mazin. John: This is Episode 735 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. What you just experienced was a flash-forward, or what we call in this podcast, a Stuart Special. They are surprisingly common in spec scripts, to a degree, they can feel cliché. Today on the show, we’ll look at what makes an effective flash-forward, when to consider them, and when to run away. We’ll also be answering a bunch of listener questions, including some from our random advice mailbag, and in our bonus segment for premium members, how to go to Hollywood parties. Craig, if there’s one thing you and I know about, it’s how to go to parties. Craig: I can’t wait to learn. John: Absolutely. There are some minimums. We’re going to teach you the minimum. Craig: We’ve been to enough. John: We’ve been to enough. Craig: We can fill people in who have not been to Hollywood parties on what they’re really like. John: Yes, absolutely. Craig: If you ever do find yourself in one, how to behave? John: 100%. Absolutely. One of the last Hollywood parties I think I went to was premiere for second season of The Last of Us, and I did the things I think you should do at a Hollywood party. We’ll talk through those. Craig: Great. Scriptnotes Survey Follow-Up ↑ Back to Top John: Some follow-up. Last week and the week before, we invited our listeners to participate in a ScriptNotes survey. We asked them to click a link, go through a form, and answer some questions about ScriptNotes. 333 people, Craig, answered that survey. That’s a good number. Craig: That’s a great number. John: About half of them were premium members. Half of them were- our regular listeners. Craig: I’d like to say about half of them enjoyed the podcast. John: More than half enjoyed the podcast. What would be terrible if you put the survey like, “We hate this show. Please stop doing it.” Craig: We’re running about a 55% right now. John: Yes, that’s what it is. Just above the minimum- Craig: Just above. John: We’re higher than Congress. Craig: Yes, we’re higher than Congress. John: That’s our goal on this podcast. Craig: We got all those people, and what did we learn? John: Some top-line numbers to tell you. 82% of our listeners listen to almost every episode. Craig: Wow. John: That’s great. Half of them have been listening for five years or longer. 40% of listeners found out about ScriptNotes through word of mouth. Craig: That makes sense. John: That does make sense. Craig: We don’t really advertise. John: We don’t advertise. The other ways people find out about it would be like Google, or it was recommended through the algorithms on Spotify, or they saw us at Austin Film Festival, that thing. Word of mouth is probably the way. I guess tell all your friends you listen to ScriptNotes. That’s probably the only way that people are going to start listening. Craig: You at home are our Salesforce. John: 100%. Craig: We do offer some commission. John: Absolutely. Craig: 100% of 0%. John: Yes, exactly. How old do you think our listeners are, Craig? What percentage of our listeners are college-aged? They’re between 18, 22, 23. Craig: I would say a curiously large number. I’m going to go with 12%. John: 3%. Craig: Wow, okay. John: Small? Craig: See, I thought 12 was curiously large, so I’m not surprised that it’s not. John: Again, this is people who filled out the survey, so there could be some of that. Craig: A little bit of self-selection. John: What percentage are between 35 and 54? Craig: That’s going to be the meat there. I’m going to go with 60. John: 65, yes, that’s 100%. Craig: We’re an adult podcast. John: We’re an adult podcast. Craig: We’re a mature podcast. John: Absolutely. What percentage of our listeners who filled out the survey have an undergraduate degree or higher? For international listeners, that’s college. Craig: Sure. We’ll have to deduct 3% from the kids who haven’t graduated yet. I’m going to say 78%. John: 98%. Craig: 98? John: 90. Craig: Oh, 90. John: Nine zero. Craig: That’s rather educated. John: Yes. Craig: I’m not surprised. John: If we were to have advertising, which we will never have advertising, that would be a very attractive market for them. What percentage of our listeners live in the Los Angeles area? Craig: I’m going to go with 22%. John: 25%. Craig: Oh. John: Yes, see? Craig knows this stuff. What percentage work in the entertainment industry? As writers or as anywhere else in the entertainment industry? Craig: 34%. John: 50%. Craig: Oh, that’s more than I thought. John: Yes, that’s good. Craig: Okay, that’s quite good. John: 67% of premium subscribers gave the premium service a 10. Craig: Oh, that’s great. John: 90% gave it an eight or higher, which feels great. People just seem really happy in that. Craig: I like the people who just keep paying for it, but they’re like, it’s a three. John: It’s a three. Craig: It’s so mid, here’s another five bucks. John: Absolutely. I’ll never stop subscribing. We asked about some other things that I’d be interested in. Of the recurring segments, people liked most of them. There wasn’t a- Craig: A big favorite or a- John: Some people don’t listen to the Three-Page Challenges. “Mike, my husband, never listens to Three-Page Challenges,” which is great. Craig: Sure. I don’t think Melissa does either. John: No, which is fine. Craig: Then again, Melissa mostly listens to the podcast to fall asleep. I think I’ve said this before. It’s not an insult, because I’m not around. She likes hearing my voice. Your voice apparently does not put her to sleep. My voice gives her some comfort. John: You are her sleepcast. Craig: I don’t think she ever makes it to the end. Then again, she rarely makes it to the end of any media before falling asleep. John: One finding that was interesting in terms of a new thing we could try to do more of is, we could describe it as a screenplay book club, which is basically where we just talk through a screenplay. It’s a deep dive, but if we could tell people in advance that we were doing it, that we’re all reading the same script and going through it. Craig: That’s a great idea. I think we should do that. John: I think we should do that too. Craig: That would be fun. John: What we need to figure out is are we doing something that’s already been produced or an unproduced screenplay. What is the best way to do this? Craig: I find that people tend to like things they’re familiar with. It’s a little bit abstract, I think. Probably fewer people will be interested in reading a script of an unproduced thing. What we could do is pick a script for something that’s been made that isn’t necessarily the one people talk about. John: 100%. That makes a lot of sense. I was also thinking if there is some screenwriter who’s really good, and just for whatever reason, this thing was never made. Craig: Well, there is that. John: They’re willing to share it with us. Craig: Scott Frank wants to give us that great unmade screenplay. I’d be happy. John: Some other suggestions from the open answer sections. Someone said they would love John and Craig to get into writing phone call scenes because I always struggle with how to best represent this type of scene on the page. We should do that. Craig: Great topic. John: An entire episode devoted to what we could learn from the work of Stephen Sondheim, Tony Kushner, Jeremy O. Harris. Craig: Oh my gosh. John: Yes. We haven’t done a lot on playwriting overall, and it does feel like- Craig: Sondheim alone deserves a 750-episode podcast, and I’m sure there are some out there, but what a wizard. What a wizard. John: I would need to do some reading, and I need to get up to speed with his workflow and the fullness of the work because I know a lot of the musicals, but I don’t know the process behind them. Craig: Very rigorous. Not surprisingly because if you look at the lyrics, they are so crafted. I do remember reading one interesting thing about a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. The show initially, when it was running, it began with this song about war. It anchored the audience in a position where they were like, this isn’t a funny show because it wasn’t a funny song. Everything that happened after that was a comedy, no one laughed at. Sondheim, in a panic, wrote Comedy Tonight. What became the opener, and nothing else changed, and everybody laughed at everything. It was just anchoring people. John: As we get into our discussion of flash-forwards, that is actually one of the main things is whatever you introduce the audience to first, it’s anchoring them. It’s setting a frame for what everything’s happening around there. A flash-forward could do that or could mislead the audience in terms of what they’re expecting. Other last things, people suggest your episode on how to write a movie is a thing people can keep coming back to. I’ve always promised I will do my own version of that. At some point, when you’re gone, I will try to do a version of that because we have similar aims but different techniques. Craig: Different methods. I have promised people how to write a television episode. One day, I’m going to have to do that one. John: Maybe when you’re done writing television episodes. If it will ever happen. Craig: My God. John: It will end. Within a year, you’ll be done writing new episodes of this series for a while. Craig: Yes, it will end, but until it ends, “Oh, man.” It’s a lot of words. John: It’s a lot of words. Craig: When I look back, and I put all the episodes together, it makes large volumes like big thick books on your bookshelf of pages. Oh, man. John, can you imagine if you did that with everything you wrote? Oh, it looked like the World Book. Hey, kids, remember the World Book? John: No reference at all. Craig: None. John: Our listeners are 35 to 54, so they’ll know what the World Book encyclopedia was. Craig: The 48 to 54’s will remember the World Book. John: That 3% who are in college right now, they have no idea what we’re talking about. Craig: The F is a World Book. That is not fire. Cringe. John: Cringe. Craig: Cringe. Stuart Specials ↑ Back to Top John: Let’s talk about flash-forwards, or as we call them on this podcast, the Stuart Special. Craig, can you remind us who Stuart Friedel is, what his role was on the podcast, and how the Stuart Special became its thing? Craig: Stuart, I believe, is the first producer of Scriptnotes. One of Stuart’s jobs, of course, as producer, is to select Three-Page Challenges. We came to note, I think probably because it was just very au courant among people writing screenplays, that so many of them began with a flash-forward where there would be some half a page or page, and then a title would say three weeks earlier, or one month earlier, or one year earlier. We came to call that a Stuart Special because we just figured, “Oh, Stuart loves these,” which he probably doesn’t. John: No. Craig: No, he’s indifferent. John: The volume of what’s coming through, these are- the ones he’s picking, and he’s not the only person who encounters them. We have a listener question from Anonymous. Drew: “I read for The Black List website, and as with your Three-Page Challenges, I get a lot of Stuart Specials. In my opinion, the flash-forwards generally aren’t interesting enough to get the audience excited about what’s to come, or they give away too much and take some of the suspense out of the story. What makes a strong flash-forward? I’m very interested to hear your thoughts.” Craig: Let’s say you had a story where the hero, in the end, kills himself. You probably wouldn’t want to start anything like that. John: Well, except they did. Craig: Except they did, and I Stuart Specialed the hell out of it. John: Go opens with a Stuart Special. Craig: There you go. Here’s the deal with Stuart Specials. Like everything else, if it’s interesting, it works. If it has purpose, and if it needs to be a Stuart Special, if it really does add something, then it’s of value. If it’s just, I don’t know how to begin this thing, so I’m just going to do a record scratch, and then someone’s going to say, “You’re probably wondering how I got here,” then it doesn’t work because you don’t need to do it. For me, at least, in Chornobyl, I did not want people to eventually get to the end and go, “I wonder what happens– Oh, no, he kills himself.” I’m just like, “Let’s just get that out of the way. Let’s ask ourselves, why did this guy end up doing that?” I think the way ones that work, work. John: We’ve talked about opening scenes many times on the show, most notably in episode 493. What we were stressing is that an opening scene needs to ask a provocative question and set a promise and an expectation for what the story is about to see. I talked about with Comedy Tonight, it is setting a frame for what the experience is going to be like. You’re starting that contract with the audience in terms of, give me your attention, and I will make it worth your while, and that’s what you’re supposed to be doing. What’s interesting about a Stuart Special is that you are essentially borrowing drama from later in the story for whatever reason. It may be because the actual chronological beginning is too quiet or too ordinary, or it doesn’t feel like where the movie’s going. That can be legitimate, but you have to really think. You are borrowing, so you’re creating a debt, and you have to make sure that you’re paying off that debt in a way that is meaningful and rewarding for the audience. Otherwise, it’s just going to feel like a cheat. Craig: Correct. You do need to be able to tell a story moving forward that allows people to arrive at that moment again and go, “Oh, actually, now that I know what I know, I feel differently about this. I’ve learned why this was important.” The most powerful Stuart Special I have ever witnessed is Gandhi. Gandhi begins with Gandhi being assassinated. As a kid, I was so shocked and traumatized from the jump. Immediately, I was in a place where I felt unsafe in the best possible way, which is to say in a movie theater where you are safe, but understanding that whatever this man did, it earned him death by gunfire. What was it? In a beautiful way, you begin to forget if the story does it well, so that when you arrive there, again, you go, “Oh, no. Oh, that’s right. Oh, no. Oh, no, he’s going to die.” That’s when the Stuart Special is working well. John: That moment where you have returned to that place that you set up in the Stuart Special, if it’s just like, “Oh, now we’re here,” that’s not so rewarding. If you’ve recontextualized that moment based on what we experienced before, now we know the characters, we know the situation, and it’s actually surprising that we got to this moment, those tend to be the ones where it really was structurally a great choice to open with that flash-forward and get us there. We talk about the framing, Comedy Tonight, this is actually comedy, you’re supposed to be laughing. Often, a movie will get big, but if we don’t know that it’s going to be able to get big later on, those first five, 10 minutes might feel so small that it doesn’t work. I would just always urge the writer to think about, does it need to be so small to start? There may be a way to actually start with the size and scale of what the thing is going to get to in those opening moments. Craig: Or it may be that the moment that you’re thinking of as a Stuart Special would play better if it just unfolded. Here’s an example. I love John Wick. I love that movie. It starts with a Stuart Special. I got to be honest, I’m not sure it’s necessary. I remember seeing that Stuart Special and thinking, “Okay, well. Sure, fine.” It didn’t actually make that moment better later, and given what happens early on in the story, I don’t think I needed it. That’s really the test for me, is would this be better to just happen once or is it better if it happens twice. John: Let’s also talk about anticipation. Because one of the things that a Stuart Special does is it creates an anticipation in the audience that we’re going to get to this moment. That can be great. It can create a sense of dread because the audience is ahead of the characters because we know that this thing is going to happen. We know the gun is going to get shot, and they don’t know they’re going to get shot. It can also make the reader impatient because it becomes that, “When are we getting to the fireworks factory? We know that’s going to happen at some point. Come on, let’s get there now.” It can make us pay less attention to the scenes leading up to it. Craig: Which is a good challenge for yourself as a writer, don’t let that happen. Titanic sinks. James Cameron did not let us sit there going, “Oh my God, this boat sinks. Can we just get to the sinking part?” No, he brilliantly distracted us with a lovely romance. I think that’s the challenge, right? That’s why Stuart Specials are seductive as a writer. You’re basically saying, “I’m a magician, Penn & Teller, do this. We’re going to show you how we do this trick. Got it? Now watch us do this trick.” It’s still awesome because there’s so much sleight of hand and ingenuity that goes into it. That’s the fun challenge of a Stuart Special. John: The last thing I’ll say about a Stuart Special is you think like, “Oh, we’re setting up the size and scale and scope of the movie,” but sometimes you’re actually just delaying the start of the movie. We’re delaying getting to know who our hero is, what their situation is because it’s all this extra [unintelligible 00:16:20] before you get there. There was a movie I watched a bit of on a plane, this was last time, with talented actors who I loved, but the opening sequence was just meant to set up the size and scale. It’s like, “I don’t care about any of these people.” Craig: Who are these people? Why is this happening? John: It’s not the movie I signed up for, so why are we watching this thing? Craig: Yes. I think sometimes what happens is people make a movie, they test it, which is a horrible process. The guy who does the focus group after inevitably says, “Let’s talk about pacing. Overall, did you think the movie dragged a little bit, was pretty well paced, or moved too quickly?” No one ever says move too quickly, ever, even though many movies do. Almost always, about half the people say it was about right, and half the people say it dragged in spots because every movie will drag in a different spot for everybody. Inevitably, they will say, “It took a while for it to get going.” Correct, that’s how stories work. Watch Star Wars, a half an hour of robots walking around in the desert. That’s how it starts, a half an hour of that and it’s slow. What do producers do? They panic, and they go, “We got to get them right away, right off the top of the bat. Take this thing, put it in the beginning, and then go three weeks earlier, and now it starts better.” No, not always. No. Sometimes, just let people, I don’t know, get there. They’ll get there. John: They’ll get there. Craig: They’ll get there. John: Takeaway here, Stuart specials are not categorically bad, but if you’re going to use one, it has to really have a purpose. It has to be a purpose, not just because the start of your movie is boring. It has to be there’s a reason why you’re starting with this moment to set up the size and scale and frame of your story that is meaningful. If you’re just doing it for those things, ask yourself, could you do it with the actual present-tense start of your story? That should be your first instinct because you’re always borrowing something from later in the story, and there’s a cost to that. Sometimes the cost is 100% worth it, but so often it’s not. Craig: It should definitely not be an excuse for you to not try to think of an awesome opening scene that would be present tense. Listener Questions ↑ Back to Top John: 100%. All right, let’s answer some listener questions, which is most of what we’re doing today. Do you want to start with this one about time jumps? Craig: Yes, it feels relevant. Drew: Michael writes, I’m writing a feature set in the late 70s that intercuts between present day 1977 and about seven months earlier. For the first roughly 40 pages, the script moves back and forth in five to 10-minute chunks, often in the same locations with the same characters. These play like different timelines more than flashbacks. My concern is clarity for the reader, especially someone skimming. The two timelines have very different tones. The present’s darker, more grounded. The earlier timeline is warmer, slightly heightened, almost nostalgic. The story really depends on tracking those shifts. What’s the cleanest, most professional way to signal these time jumps on the page? John: That’s a common thing we run into. Craig: That’s an extreme situation, though, because there’s so many shifts back and forth, and it’s not large jumps in time. If you go from the 1970s to the 2000s, it’ll just feel different from the way people are talking and probably what they’re doing. Seven months in time is not a lot. If it’s something really subtle like that, the choices, as far as I can tell, are– The most mundane thing is just, in your scene header, you just say what year it is. You can constantly remind people which part. I guess you’d have to go with the month if you’re just doing a seven-month shift. John: Yes. My instinct would be, because I’ve had to do this in a couple of things, is for the things that are set further back, you put past there and don’t put present. Because the present is our present, that’d be confusing. Craig: The present is assumed. John: If you just put the years, I worry that you would actually– There’s two timelines, just mark one of them differently. Craig: Seven months earlier is a weird thing to write. It’s a weird thing to write 40 times. The other big swing you could do is to just let people know right off the top of the bat, this is what’s going to happen in this script. When we’re in this timeline, it looks like a regular script. When we’re in this timeline, the font is like this. John: Greta Gerwig does this in Little Women, and all of the past, I think, is in red. Craig: Yes, exactly. If you can visually set it apart, then you never have to mention anything because they’ll know. John: Because when you actually make your movie, you’re going to do things to visually distinguish those two timelines. It’s a problem of the script on the page. Craig: This is the thing where people are, “But the rules.” I guess Greta Gerwig didn’t hear about the rules. John: No. Craig: You know what? There’s an interesting thing people ask, what is a common trait among successful screenwriters and as far as I could tell, the only common trait is none of us give a damn about the stupid rules. Literally none of us. John: Related to that with Greta Gerwig, I would say that she, and this is true to every good screenwriter I know, is she actually does care about the read and she’s trying to make sure that she’s fully communicating what the movie feels like on the page. Craig: That’s her job. That’s her job. Don’t direct on the page. Yes, do it and make sure people are feeling what you want them to feel. What you said is what she cares about is the read, not the rules. John: Correct. Now, let’s intersperse this with some random advice. Where do you want to start with it? Drew: Let’s start with Anais. She writes, “My oldest is going to kindergarten in the fall.” Craig: Oh, congrats. Drew: “Any advice for the elementary school years?” John: By kindergarten, your kid has probably already gotten all the daycare sicknesses. Basically, they pick up all the things, which is just fine. Craig: No one gets chickenpox anymore because of the vaccine. John: Which is great. Listen, kindergarten is largely about learning to sit in a circle and just learning how to be around other kids and just do the things. They’ll be very basic. They’ll learn to read. They’ll learn to count and stuff. They’ll mostly just learn how to be a student and how to follow some rules and follow some structure. That should really be all your goal there. Craig: The elementary years are the best years. This is the good news, Anais. Your child is, I assume, five or six. It’s typical kindergarten age. By the time they’re done with elementary school, they’ll be 10. Yes, some kids, especially girls around 10, will start tilting over into a different phase of life. At least five, six, seven, eight, nine, those are the best years because they’re children. They are not wrapped up in anything adolescent. They are fun and ridiculous, and they still love birthday parties. They love birthday parties. My advice to you, Anais, is, oh my God, enjoy this because, yes, man, then it gets a little crazy. John: One luxury you have when they’re this age is that they probably get along pretty well with a lot of kids. See if you can figure out which parents you can actually stand being around because you’re going to play dates, and birthday parties, and stuff like that, where you’re going to just be around other kids’ parents a lot. If you can find friends, other parents you can stand to be around, and your kids get along, you’re happier. You’re better. Craig: You know what? That brings to mind one last bit of advice I have for Anais. I have two kids. One is on the spectrum, one is not. Now, the thing about kids who are neurodivergent is, socially– As we know, a lot of neurodivergent people struggle socially, but children will generally struggle less socially in the elementary school years because everyone is struggling socially because they’re also young. What happens is somewhere around 11, 12, 13, what do we call the non-neurodivergent people? John: Neurotypical. Craig: Neurotypical kids will start to peel off and accelerate socially, and the neurodivergent kids just stay where they are, and then the gap grows, and then trouble starts. One bit of advice I have for you, Anais, is if you feel maybe your kid is neurodivergent and is struggling a little bit socially, but you’re tempted to go, “Oh, but they have friends,” keep an eye on it. Take it seriously because it’s never too early to learn skills, and it can become a significant issue for them and create a lot of stress for them and you once they hit those horrible middle school years. John: Yes, middle school is universally bad for everybody. Craig: Nightmare. John: If you’re coming in there- Craig: Absolute nightmare. John: -with extra challenges, it’s horrible. All right, let’s go back to normal questions. Charlie in Sheffield. Drew: “I’m very hyped for The Sheep Detectives.” John: Congratulations on your movie, The Sheep Detectives. Craig: Yay. In theaters. Drew: “I noticed Craig is credited with both screenplay and screen story. What’s a screen story? Why say both? Presented like this, aren’t you just saying the same thing twice?” Craig: It’s embarrassing. No, we’re not saying the same thing twice, but I wish we could just fold it into one thing. Here’s the brief summary. When you adapt something from source material, in this case, there is a book, Three Bags Full, written by a fantastic German author pseudonymically named Leonie Swan. I don’t even know her real name, but she’s a lovely person. When you adapt things from source material, you get screenplay by, but if you adapt it in such a way that you create a story that is significantly different from the source material, then only through an arbitration, the Writers Guild may award the screenwriter also screen story by. The reason that’s important for us as writers is it confers separated rights, which we’ve gone through in a prior episode. If you get screenplay by and story by in an original film, they just fold it together and make it written by. Why they refuse? I’ve tried. They refuse to fold screenplay and screen story by into written by because they’re like, “Well, because written by is just for originals.” You end up with this very silly arrangement of multiple credits. I don’t like it. I apologize. John: That’s reality. It’s one of those things which with great effort and probably a member vote, you could change. To change those credit things is elaborate and complicated. It’s a question of where do you spend your energy. Craig: You basically have to go to the membership to get a vote, and then you have to go to the AMPTP and have them agree to make that change, also because it’s dictated by the MBA. John: I will tell you that the AMPTP wants to say no to anything, even if it’s 100% free. It will cost them nothing. Craig: If you offered them pizza, they would say, ” Pay us for it.” John: Absolutely. Craig: What, we’re buying it for you. No, their immediate answer is no. They love saying no. Everything you ask puts everything else you ask in jeopardy. Of course, if the Writers Guild had a– Many years ago, there was a mid-contract mechanism, called the Contract Adjustment Committee, which was somewhat controversial. The idea is that as little, tiny things would come up inside of the term, you could then go back and, without an official reopening of the contract, adjust some things. Now that our contract term is four years, there is perhaps some wisdom in considering the value of something like that. This is the thing you would do in that. John: Totally. Craig: It’s not a big money issue- it’s just a little friction point. John: Absolutely. A related question that I think we may have answered on the podcast before, but sometimes a writer’s name will appear multiple times in the credit block because they did some writing by themselves. They also wrote with a partner, or they wrote with multiple partners on things. You see one person’s name mentioned three times in a credit block. It is weird and uncomfortable. You could imagine some scenario down the road where the mathematical credits should be a certain way, and the actual credit you see on screen could be slightly different than that. Craig: It actually does work like that in those cases if the writers agree. If you have written by A and then end the writing team of A and B, if writer A agrees, and they should, but sometimes they don’t, it’ll just say written by A and B, but A will get more residuals because of that. That is possible, but in this case, not possible. John: It wasn’t, yes. Weirdly, yes. Craig: It looks like I just threw a tantrum and asked for my name to be on there twice, no. Anyway, I hope they enjoy the movie. John: Let’s answer a listener question from Colton. Drew: What is something that is undervalued yet offers the greatest return when it comes to health or quality of life? Craig: Oh my gosh. John: I will say relationships. Obviously, having a life partner is incredibly valued, but I think people know that. I would say other relationships. Relationships outside of your marriage are really important. That you have a group of people that you can- Craig: Friends. John: Friends, yes. Our weekly D&D game, super important. My other friends who I see independently of Mike, super important. Craig: Yes, especially as men grow older. There’s just so much research to show that women maintain lots of friendships as they get older and men don’t, and then they just get sad and die. The answer, I would probably say there is sleep by any means necessary. People struggle with sleep, and you can get by on less than you should get. The more you get, the better off it seems you are, unless you’re depressed. If you are feeling fairly mentally healthy, getting sleep, and if you have trouble sleeping, I’m a pro-sleep aid person as well. Whatever it takes, I don’t care. Sleep. I know they’ll say, “It’s not as good of a sleep.” It’s better than not sleeping. I just think people struggle, and sleep is huge. John: Money spent on a good mattress, a dark, quiet room, try a white noise machine. Do the things- Craig: Yes, blackout curtains. Although we’re all trying to be energy conscious, one thing we do know is it’s hard to sleep in a hot room. John: Air conditioning is good. Craig: Yes. John: Victoria has an audio question. Victoria: I wanted to ask a question about the problematic way that unfilmable is used. I don’t think it’s a very helpful note because I almost never see it applied to visual logic issues. It’s usually something that’s directed at– The camera can’t see it, so it’s not real. I also see it frequently criticizing a screenwriter’s use of internal character narrative. I really like to use that, and I like reading it. Not a ton of it. One of my favorite examples of this is in the first Chornobyl script, where Bryukhanov is said to envision a very likely fate for himself. An inquiry, an arrest, a trial, a bullet. I love that because I feel it. I feel it from the script. That said, I do think there is a valid note that applies to the invisible information being laid out for the reader that the viewer has no way of getting. I guess my question is, when do you decide to add detail to a character’s internal world, and when is the information on the script readable but not legible to the viewer? Thank you so much. Craig: Thank you. That’s a good question. I’m certainly a criminal when it comes to this. I do this all the time. Victoria, to me, the big difference in what I would call a annoying and useless unfilmable and a helpful, useful unfilmable is when it informs the actor so that they can perform something because then it is filmable. Their inner thoughts, their inner feelings, and emotions come out. Most of the time, I think good direction is not about how to say the words. It’s about how to feel or what you might want to feel here, and it comes through. It is filmable. That line, for instance, Con O’Neill made that clear in his performance. It was filmable. What I don’t particularly find useful are these omniscient, novelish narrations where a character is introduced and then the writer says, there are so-and-so who thinks they’re this and thinks that, but really they’re this or really they’re that. Well, that actually is not filmable because you’re not their writer. If it’s something the character is feeling in the moment, or thinking in the moment, then yes. John: I would add to that, if the audience is going to experience that visually in watching the movie, then it’s not unfilmable. Sometimes you’re really portraying, if you’re talking about what this small village feels like and you’re giving description to it that may not directly match what this is, but it can be a metaphor that just helps us understand what this is going to feel like when we actually see it, and it gives information to the director- Craig: Absolutely. John: 100% valid. Craig: Absolutely. It’s the [unintelligible 00:33:28] doesn’t know it is the classic, right? That’s the most cliché, horrible, unfilmable there is. So-and-so arrives, “hot but doesn’t know it.” How the hell do I know that she doesn’t know it? How is that possible that I can show that she doesn’t know she’s hot? I’m not sure. Anyone has actually ever not known they were hot anyway? Maybe some people do, but there’s only one way for me to find out. That’s for her to be shocked when somebody thinks she’s hot. Otherwise, it’s useless. It’s useless. Things like that, we avoid as best as we can, but anything that would help the actor, the production designer, the director, the costume designer, the composer making the score, anything that helps them is filmable. John: Absolutely. I will also say there’s things you might include in an outline or a treatment that don’t make it through to the screenplay because those documents, they’re preliminary, and you can swing bigger in some of those ways because it’s not- Craig: They’re meta. John: They’re meta, yes. They’re talking about the scene rather than being the scene itself. Craig: Exactly. Yes, they’re meta. Whereas the screenplay is the drama, and you can say whatever you want in an outline. You can interrupt yourself and say, “Okay, imagine this is like from Breaking Bad except blah, blah.” You can do whatever you want in an outline. John: That would be dumb in a screenplay. It’s referencing another movie in your screenplay- [crosstalk] John: Yes. Final bit of random advice from Nick. Drew: “What advice would you give to your older self?” Craig: Didn’t we just do this? John: We did our younger selves. Craig: Oh, this is older self. John: Older self, yes. I don’t know. I guess I would have to do it based on my observation of older people and things that frustrated me about them, or things I’ve seen that worked really well for them. Let’s go on the positive. Craig: Okay. John: Dick Zanuck, who produced Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Big Fish, and many of Tim Burton’s movies, and was just an absolute mensch, I would say, don’t retire just because it’s what’s expected to happen to you. He genuinely loved working and producing movies for Tim Burton. It gave him so much joy, and so he didn’t stop just because he was old. He was loving doing it, and so why stop? He also called his sons every day, no matter where he was, and I love that for him. Craig: Oh, how old am I? John: You can decide. Craig: Well, I’m going to project forward to quite old. My advice is, don’t bother doing a whole bunch of stuff to try and live longer. You’re not going to. Just keep rolling. Just keep rolling, you’re good. You’re good. No one lives forever. No one lives forever. What are you going to do? You’re going to start going to the gym every day? No, you’re not. At 80, you’re going to decide that’s when I’m going to start? John: People don’t fundamentally change. I think that’s an important thing to remember. When I see people say, “Oh, well, maybe I’ll change.” No, they won’t change. They never will change. Craig: No, old dog. No new tricks required. I would advise myself to eagerly go to any lifetime achievement ceremony that might come my way- because that’s actually the good sign that you’re done. That’s when you know they don’t want you anymore. They start giving you the thank you for your service awards. John: Let’s go to another audio question. This one’s from Robert. Drew: This one’s also follow-up from our conversation about avoidance in episode 731. Robert: Hi. I just listened to your episode on protagonists’ motivation being driven by their desire to avoid things. I was just wondering if you have any tips for how to differentiate between a character driven by avoidance and a character that appears to have very little agency. I’ve received notes on a story that I am currently in the middle of and about half the people respond to the character positively and can totally understand why he’s doing what he’s doing, while about the other 50% of people seem to very much think that the character doesn’t have any agency, that they’re very much just reacting to everything around them and therefore is not very likable. Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much. John: Let’s recap what we were talking about before with avoidance. The thesis of that episode, 731, was that we tend to think about characters going off on a quest and wanting to do and achieve things, but often they’re just trying to avoid uncomfortable situations. In agency, we’re talking about a character’s ability to take action that moves them in a direction they want to move in, so they proactively go after a thing. They’re related concepts, but they’re not quite the same. A prisoner has very little agency over certain aspects of their life. A person trapped in a bad domestic situation might have little agency over certain things. Yet, as an audience, we get frustrated by watching that person because we feel trapped there with them. Craig: Yes. This is a bit different than the question of wanting something or avoiding something. This comes down to– Robert is describing what we would often call a passive character, which is a very easy character for people giving notes to pick on, and here’s why. Passive characters don’t seem to demand our attention because what we’re looking for in stories are those special moments in someone’s life where something important happens. There are some art movies where you just sit there and watch someone stroll around through some random week of their life. I don’t like those. I like movies where stuff happens. When you have a character who doesn’t have agency, at a minimum, you have to give them a desire, a hope, some need. Even if you were to say, “Here’s a story about a prisoner, they’re never getting out, ever, and there’s no way to get out.” Then the question is, how do they survive here? Can they find love? Can they find some spiritual peace? Can they figure out how to handle their own guilt or remorse? Can they seek amends? What is it that they want to do? They need something or are they just trying to stay alive, which would be avoiding death? Either way, what you really can’t do is just get pushed around and react without any goal. John: Yes. I want to stick up for and defend two different groups. The groups who might say, well, there’s a whole range of cinema that is valid, which has passive heroes, passive protagonists. They’re just sure seeing their daily life. That’s absolutely valid. That’s not what we focus on on this podcast, which is movies where things happen, movies where people go on a one-time journey that is transformational, which can absolutely happen in a prison movie. You’re right in saying that there has to be a point of view, a perspective that the movie has on this character and why we should be caring about this character and why we’d be so interested and invested. I want to defend the people giving these notes, saying, “I didn’t connect or didn’t relate because this character just wasn’t doing anything. It wasn’t moving the ball forward. That was my set of expectations.” Craig: That’s what I want. John: Yes. As we said from the start, from Comedy Tonight, you’re setting a frame on why we’re supposed to be paying attention to this character and his situation, what the journey is going to be. Maybe that’s really the issue is you’re not properly establishing what it is we should be looking for in this movie with this character balling things forward. Craig: Great. Great points. There is a genre that I would call person trapped in lunacy. Kafka writes these stories beautifully. Terry Gilliam’s movie Brazil is insane and bananas. Jonathan Price is a cog in a massive machine who slowly starts to realize that he’s a cog in a massive machine. Then, of course, it changes him. There’s also the after-hours/something wild type of story where an average Joe ends up in a series of wild circumstances that they weren’t expecting. They are pushed around, except inevitably they’re also in desperate need of this, and they fall in love. The point of the story is you need to live. These are essential, I think, to traditional storytelling. Certainly, if you hand somebody a script that doesn’t have that, give them fair warning. This is not one of those scripts. If you don’t like stories where nothing happens, this one isn’t for you. Drew: It’s fair. A question from Mare. I’ve been working on an original screenplay that features a nine-year-old girl. I’ve had a few professionals in the field read it and provide really helpful notes. One producer director argued that, in no uncertain terms, that unless I were to direct a film about a child protagonist, a film featuring a child would never be made and could never be sold. He suggested that if it was something I needed to write, that I should write this as a book instead of a screenplay. I’d appreciate your insight on this opinion. I can’t shake the story. Most of the stories I’m drawn to feature younger people coming of age. Craig: John, what do you think about this producer and his interesting insight into Hollywood? John: This producer can say, like, “I wouldn’t make this movie.” Craig: Totally. Not a problem. John: That’s true, and that’s valid. Is there somebody who would make this movie? Yes. Craig: They’ve made movies about children, starring children, since time immemorial. Shirley Temple, for God’s sake. Not to mention Little Man Tate and Sixth Sense and the movie where Macaulay Culkin died from a bee sting. Spoiler alert. There’s been so many movies. John: Home Alone. Craig: Home Alone. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. There’s so many movies starring, I don’t know, are they specifically nine? I don’t know. Yes. How old was Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone? Drew: Probably nine or 10. Craig: Let’s Google that. I’m tempted to say about this producer, what an idiot. I’m going to. What an idiot. Drew: Macaulay Culkin was nine years old. Craig: He was nine years old in Home Alone, one of maybe the most successful family film of all time. The reason I don’t like this producer is because they’re doing this thing that makes me insane, which is to elevate their personal issue to an industry-wide rule that does not exist. It is an appeal to authority they do not have, or rather, it’s an assumption of authority they do not have. They are inviting people to just throw a wadded-up poster of Home Alone in their face. I shall do so virtually. Ha. John: Is it valid to say it’s harder to make a movie with a nine-year-old protagonist? Sure, but it’s hard to make any movie. Come on. Craig: They’re all hard. John: Every movie’s hard. The thing, Mare, you should take away from this is try to get your movie made. Also, hopefully, this script is great, and that this is a sample for you to do other stuff too. You should not avoid writing the thing you want to write because it has a child protagonist. Stand by Me. Craig: Stand by Me, for God’s sake. I’m going to actually get angry about this. Mare, broad advice for you now for your life. Anyone who says you can never do blankety blank in Hollywood, especially when it’s something that you know you can, don’t argue. Just walk away. John: They’re not the person for you. Craig: Cut them out of your life. I don’t know who that producer is, but if they are successful, it’s a mistake. It’s literally a cosmic error. John: There’s producers who would say, “Oh, you can’t make a no-budget horror film,” because it’s not a thing they don’t want to make. Craig: Exactly. You could say, I’m not going to make it. You could definitely say it’s really hard making a movie with a nine-year-old kid as the star because the restrictions on shooting with children are very specific and very onerous. John: Also, well-intentioned and good because– Craig: Oh, necessary. Yes. We don’t want child labor laws to be violated. It’s tough. We have kids on our show all the time, usually in smaller parts. We just know, here’s the deal. The time they take to ride there, then the time that they’re in the makeup chair, the time it takes to take the makeup off, that plus lunch, plus their teaching time, plus their mandated rests, and they can’t work more than eight hours total anyway, including all that stuff, you end up maybe four hours shooting with them, maybe? John: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had five kids. How challenging. Craig: It ends up costing way more money to make the same amount of movie with a kid than it would with an adult, like you said, for good reason. Still, people do it all the time because it works all the time. I’m not saying it doesn’t fail all the time, but when I say all the time, I mean lots of the time throughout history. John: Let’s do another audio question. This one from Sydney. Sydney: Hey, John and Craig. My name’s Sydney. My question is craft-related. I find that in my scripts, I often describe a lot of movement in the action lines, like a character walks this way or crosses the room. I’m actually noticing I end a lot of scenes with a character leaving a room or walking away from another character if they’ve just had a confrontation. I just feel like I do that very often, especially with the ending the scenes that way. Then I don’t know how to end them. Is it better to just end on the dialogue line or is that cutting it off too early? Sometimes it feels like that’s almost getting out too early, but maybe that’s just because I’m used to ending it with someone walking away. I’ve been looking at other scripts for movies or pilots I’ve seen just to compare what’s on the screen versus what they wrote in that scene. I did just want your guys’ input to see what you thought. John: It’s because she’s noticing a pattern, and it’s bugging her a bit that she’s doing it. It’s valid. Listen, characters walking away in a scene, it’s a choice, but if you’re doing it in every scene, something weird. Craig: It’s a rough choice, specifically for ending a scene. If somebody walks away with purpose, if it is shocking that they walk away, if they walk away and slam a door behind them, if they walk away and disappear into a fog, sure. If they finish an argument and then turn and walk away, you’re just watching that. Then the question is, okay, let’s imagine us in the movie theater, where are we going to put our camera? At that point, you need to really end the scene on how the person who is being left feels. That’s more important than just somebody walking away because you’re not just going to watch people walking. It’s shoe leather there at the end of a scene. John: I would ask, Sydney, if we’re following the person who’s walking away, a good choice can often be they have the confrontation, cut, and then we find them walking away, and then we can focus on them. The reaction they don’t want to show to the other person, and what that is, that’s a chance for us to get into that space. Just look at what you’re doing there. In terms of the movement within a scene, Craig and I are both huge fans of screen geography. Let people move around, let us see where things are going. You might worry like, oh, you’re going to box people in on the blocking, you’ll figure it out. It gives a sense of what the flow is in the space and what things are like because if it feels like two characters are just standing, talking to each other in a scene, it’s not good. Craig: No. If you don’t know how physically it’s possible for these things to happen, you end up with directors on the day just coming up with stuff which they seem to love and which I don’t. John: Lots of bits. Craig: I think it’s important for the screenwriter to give everybody something real to hang onto. Then, when you get there, if it’s not quite working, you adjust. I do that to my own writing all the time when I’m directing, but at least have a basis that is set in reality. Moving people around, where are they standing, Lindsay Doran’s most important question. You say two people are standing in a bar. Where in the bar? Against the bar? By a wall? Why are they standing by a wall? Why aren’t they sitting? How did one get there so quickly from all the way across the room? These questions are worth asking. When you end a scene, one thing that you mentioned is, okay, you can cut to the next thing. Sydney, don’t think about the ending of your scene as the ending of a scene. Think about the ending of the scene as one side of a cut. The other side of the cut tells us something about how you ended, and how you ended is going to tell us something about what you see next. If you start thinking that way, for instance, if you have somebody walking away and the next shot is somebody else walking toward us, or somebody else walking away, that’s a different person, or there’s some sort of contrast, that could be interesting. Think about the relationship between what we call the A side of the cut and the B side of the cut. John: If you had two walking scenes back-to-back, it could work, but it’s also going to feel weird. Craig: It’s going to start getting a little silly, isn’t it? John: Yes, it is. You got to think about that. What’s also good that you recognize here, Sydney, is movies are not plays. You don’t have to enter and exit characters all the time. The film does that for you, which is great. Craig: Last bit of advice for you, I love a door. John: Love a door. Craig: Love a door. I am obsessed with doors. I write doors all the time. I know there are things that I do that, have you seen that Aaron Sorkin supercut where he just reuses dialogue all the time? It’s all really good. I don’t do that, I don’t think, but just giving away one of my crutches. People will have a conversation with somebody, then turn, walk away, get to a door, stop, turn back, say one last thing, and then go, and the door closes, and that’s an end of a scene. A door closing, scene’s over. I like that. It’s better than just walking. John: We’re going to have Elaine come on the podcast shortly to talk about The Devil Wears Prada. I think I noticed in her movie, which I may not have time to bring up in our conversation, is glass doors. There’s a lot of times where people are walking– You’re able to see somebody through a glass door, but not open the door, or the decision to open a door or not open the door, and so that movement becomes really important in what they can see and what they can’t see. I love it. Craig: Doors. John: Doors. Craig: Doors. John: Helpful. Doors and windows. Craig: Big fan of doors. John: Let’s answer a question from Andrew. Drew: I searched your transcripts and looked in the script notes book, but I haven’t found an instance of you two tackling best practices for cutting down your screenplay. You mentioned how vast Scott Frank’s early drafts are. Craig: [laughs] Poor Scott. Drew: It’s well-known to me. That’s reality. Craig: Yes, it is. It’s quite well-documented. Drew: My question is, how does he trim those back? Everything in my script seems so important and special. I’ve condensed many scenes, and I’ve arrived late, and I’ve left early. All right. John: This is a great question. I think we should save it for his own marquee topic. I know you’ve written on the blog about cutting. To give you a taste of what’s to come, it’s like you can make the small changes, but ultimately, if you really need to cut a lot, you need to make big changes. You need to cut scenes and sequences rather than trying to just take all the fat out of existing scenes. Craig: It’s definitely a topic worth its own episode, because I think if you have a lot to cut, it is either an indication of the nature of your process or a problem with the story itself and the way it was conceived in the first place, if you have a lot to cut. For some people, it is part of their process, and they are aware as they’re writing that, okay, I’m not sure if this is going to make it in or not, but I need it now. Sounds like, in this case, I like all of this. Well, okay. Then I suspect there’s actually an unseen problem here that we will dig into and diagnose at a later time. One Cool Thing ↑ Back to Top John: At a later time. Let’s try one cool thing. My one cool thing is a blog post by somebody named Malmsbury. Craig: Malmsbury? John: Malmsbury. M-A-L-M-S-B-U-R-Y. Craig: Love it. John: What they’re doing is they’re looking back at a cookbook, Microwave Cooking for One, which is a book from the mid-1980s. Craig: My heart just sank. John: It garnered momentary attention on the internet as being the world’s saddest cookbook. Craig: Honestly, most microwave cooking is for one, but that is such a profoundly sad title. John: Well, you would think so. It’s written by Marie T. Smith, and she wrote this book, Microwave Cooking for One. What I like about this blog post is it’s going back and just resuscitating and reframing, basically, how to think about this cookbook because the author goes through and actually makes a bunch of the recipes. It’s like, this woman, Marie T. Smith, was an absolute genius. In terms of, if you take the mandate of, okay, what is the best way to cook everything on earth in a microwave oven? She just figures it out and basically, like, do this for seven seconds and this, this. She has all these techniques for browning and crisping things in a microwave. It is basically a pay-on to the power of technology and the wonders of a microwave oven. Craig: I get that it would be incredibly useful. It’s just the title. John: Oh, it is. Craig: Why did it need to be for one? You know what I mean? If she’s so good at stuff, why limit it to just– You could just say, if you’re going solo, do this. If you’re cooking for two to four, do this. I mean, for one? Oh. John: The blog post does go into the whole, the one of it all, because also, like cooking for two, it’s more than twice as long to do it because it’s not like heating an oven or a fry pan, where you can sort of do, it’s just as quick to do it for two as for one. It actually is different. We don’t reward domestic home life optimization and stuff to where we should. We don’t acknowledge like, oh, there’s actually, it’s like a scientific rigor applied to things you don’t normally apply it to. Craig: Some great early life hacks. John: Yeah, completely. It’s a person, if she had lived at the YouTube era, we would celebrate her as like, look at this woman who’s figured out how to do all this stuff. Craig: You can’t shake the image of somebody softly crying while the little thing inside the microwave rotates and just waiting. It’s still always three minutes left. It is eternally three minutes to go. John: Craig, I don’t know if you’ve witnessed this phenomenon where you have work crews on a site, like they’re doing stuff at your house. Sometimes they will bring a microwave oven to plug it in so that they’ll have a microwave oven on their truck, and that’ll heat up all their food, which I just find terrific and remarkable. I just love it. Craig: Oh, a little microwave is powerful. I mean, look, we’re old enough to remember what life was like before them. John: Absolutely. I remember our first microwave. Craig: Yes. The first time you microwave something, you lost your mind. John: Incredible. Craig: I feel the same way about the air fryer. The air fryer is just incredible. John: Yes, we don’t have an air fryer. Craig: It is spectacular. John: Yes, everyone knows that. Craig: Basically, it’s like a microwave, not technologically, but practically, it’s like a microwave that takes maybe twice as long as a microwave would, but tastes 10 times better. John: In many ways, I was reading different blog posts about technologies and what’s the earliest the technology could have been invented. The air fryer, it’s just a hairdryer mounted differently. Craig: It’s just a massive convection air dryer thing that works so well. John: We could have had them 30 years ago. It’s a while that it was invented. Craig: There it is. My sister introduced me to the air fryer many years ago. We played D&D, and we had pizza. We often do. I always over-order pizza because I’m a Jew, and if you run out of food, you go to hell. We don’t even have hell, but they make hell for you. I end up freezing all these slices of pizza, and putting pizza in a microwave is sad. Putting pizza straight from the freezer, a slab, like a piece of slate, put it in an air fryer, eight minutes later, brand new pizza, like it just got made. It’s spectacular. John: Lacking an air fryer, what we do is heat up the oven with a pan in there so the pan gets hot, and then you put it on there, 400 degrees, a few minutes, delicious. Air fryer. Craig: Air fryer, that’s great. John: Craig, what’s your one cool thing? Craig: As is often the case, I have a game. Now, as everyone knows, I’m rather obsessed with Baldur’s Gate 3. Because I love what Larian, the company that made Baldur’s Gate 3, did, I went back, and I played Divinity 2 and then Divinity 1, which were the prior games. Of course, I will play the upcoming Divinity, but I’m out of Larian games to play. Of course, I go on my Steam Deck like, “Let’s say you love Larian games. What’s like it?” The answer is, here’s something like it. It is. This is not at Larian level. I appreciate what this company is doing. They’re very small, actually. It’s a company called Tactical Adventures. Do they have the polish of a Larian game? No. I think the entire company’s 35 people, or something, where Larian, I believe, employs hundreds of people. They made a game called Solasta II. They made Solasta I: Crown of the Magister. Then they made Solasta II. It is in early access right now, which is how Larian does their games, too. They don’t give you the entire game upfront. They give you a chunk of it. Then they’re using it to get feedback, debug, advanced features. It works like Baldur’s Gate very much, what I really enjoy about it is that it is not just based on the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset and encyclopedia the way that Baldur’s Gate was. It is firmly, very strictly attached to 5th Edition rules. The way we play, that super crunchy way, that’s how this works. I actually find it on that level fun. I wish them great success. I believe in little companies trying things. Not everything has to be Baldur’s Gate 3. John: Totally. You’re playing on Steam Deck. Is it just a Steam game? Craig: I’m playing on Steam Deck. It is available for platform. I guess it’s available on PC as well. I guess everything that’s on Steam is theoretically PC-ish. John: I’ve not been using my Steam Deck at all recently, so maybe I’ll break that and try it. Craig: I’m obsessed. I’m obsessed with the Steam Deck. I know I could sit down and play, and I will. Look, once Grand Theft Auto 6 hits, I’m not going to be on my damn Steam Deck. I’m going to be playing on the biggest screen I have on my PlayStation, going crazy. John: Have you hooked up your PlayStation to your big screen downstairs? Craig: No. My home used to be owned by Kevin Williamson. Kevin had set up a Sony PlayStation down there to go on the big home theater screen, but it was an older PlayStation. When I moved in, I was like, “Ahh.” It’s such a big screen. It’s overwhelming. John: Yes, that was my worry. Craig: Rather than feel like I’m being punished by the game I’m playing is so big, even the sound down there is great, it’s a little bit better on just a good old-fashioned, big-ass, wall-mounted. I play upstairs in a little gaming nook. It’s my gaming nook. John: Everyone needs a gaming nook. That’s the advice we needed to– Craig: Everyone needs a gaming nook. Doesn’t matter how big or small. John: Whatever your game is. Craig: Doesn’t matter. John: Could be a puzzle nook. Could be whatever you want to do. Craig: Whatever. You got to have one. John: Got to have a nook. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, send us a link to [email protected]. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. If you want to include an audio version of your question, go for it. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. The Scriptnotes book is available wherever you buy books. I just saw you put through an email that we’re on another college’s curriculum. I think it was at University of Missouri, Kansas City, I think. Craig: University of Missouri, Kansas City. Yes. Those students have to buy the book. John: Those students have to buy the book. That’s how we do it. One by one. Apparently, the first time they’ve ever signed a book, and the book is ours. Craig: Well, that’s great. Thank you, university. John: You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You’ll find us on Instagram @scriptnotespodcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. Craig: 80% of you really enjoy it. John: Yes, which is fantastic. Craig: Thank you for continuing to enjoy it. John: I think it was more like 90%. Craig: 90% of you enjoy it. John: That’s a very high number. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those backup episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Hollywood parties. Craig: Woo-hoo. John: Craig, it’s always a Hollywood party with you. Craig: Aw. Thank you. John: Thank you, Craig. Thank you, Drew. How to Behave at Hollywood Parties ↑ Back to Top John: All right. The question was how to go to Hollywood parties. Craig: Got to go to Hollywood parties. John: I’m taking this as not to how to get invited to Hollywood parties because– Craig: No. We can’t help you with that. John: We can’t help you with that. We can talk about, okay, you’ve been invited to a Hollywood party. It could be a premiere party. It could be a for-your-consideration party. It could be some producers throwing a party at their house. It could be a friend of ours doing a New Year’s Eve party. You’re going to a Hollywood party. What to do? Let’s start with when do you arrive? Craig: If it’s a premiere, you have to get there to see the movie. John: Except the thing to point out is they always start late. You can get there and be waiting for an hour in the theater. Craig: They will tell you that you have to be at the theater by 7:30 PM under penalty of death. Around 7:50, the biggest star arrives, starts walking the carpet, and doing interviews. I’ve been to some that have really gone late, but typically speaking, it’s actually not too bad. A typical premiere will start about 30 minutes after. Then there’s always a speech or two. They will close the doors on you, though. Better to be on time for those things, and what I like to do is, you get to a premiere, and the theater lobby will be choked with people all yip, yip, yip, yip to each other. Oh my God, me, me, me, me. Even at premieres for things I’ve done, I don’t know almost anyone there. I’m like, “Who are all these people?” I just go into the theater, and I sit down. It’s nice and quiet in there for a while everyone’s, me, me, me, me in the lobby. If you like chit-chat and being smashed up against people, sure, the lobby. John: The party would be after the screening, generally. Ideally, it’s at the same venue or an easy walk. I always hate it when there’s a premiere someplace and you have to drive to a second thing. Craig: It’s pretty rare, but yes, typically, it’s a little walk. If it’s a bigger premiere, it’s almost always a little walk because you have to get to some larger venue, but they’re pretty good about keeping it close by. The party will start technically immediately after the end of the movie. It will take possibly an hour or two before it really gets going. I don’t know what happens in that hour or two. Where did everyone go? Did they just go somewhere else and then go to the party? I’m always befuddled. John: I’m thinking of two different parties, party for the first Iron Man and the party for the second season of The Last of Us, which were the premiere was at the Chinese and the party afterwards was at the Roosevelt Hotel, which is great because it’s an easy walk to get over there. A gladiator, too. It’s also the same situation. Yes, it’s weird. You get there, and it’s empty. It’s like, why did it take– Craig: Did I make a mistake? John: Then it does fill up. Craig: It fills up. What happens in part is when the movie ends, if you are involved in the production, as you’re walking out, 4,000 people stop you to tell you how wonderful you are. Some of them you actually want to talk to, and you haven’t seen for a while, and you’re so happy that they’re there. You don’t know. Some of them you’re supposed to know, and you don’t know, but you get stuck. Everybody gets bottlenecked and stuck. Of course, you also naturally want to talk to the people that you’ve made the show with. If you’re a guest at one of these things, just be aware you’re going to have to weave your way around this thick chunk of people. If you feel like congratulating someone, congratulate someone that isn’t currently being congratulated or is being under-congratulated. The actors don’t need more. Go find the writer. Then make your way to the party and enjoy the fact that there’s not a big line for food, and you could probably get a drink pretty quickly. John: Let’s say we’re now at the party. I want to stress that you may have some agenda. Just think about what your agenda is. At a party, generally, I want to congratulate the person who I want to congratulate. I wanted to stay at your party until I could see you and say, congratulations, Craig. Craig: Exactly. Bye. [laughs] John: Same to Favreau on the first Iron Man and through the second. Once I’ve done that, I can leave. Craig: You can leave. John: I can leave. Craig: You can leave. It’s up to you. John: Absolutely. I can stay. I can go. Even if it’s not a “congratulate the person” party, it’s worth thinking about who am I expecting to see there, because that way I can think, oh, I’ll look out for that person and be able to have those conversations. For example, I was at the Interstellar premiere, and I didn’t know Christopher Nolan at that point, but I did know Lisa Joy and Jonah Nolan. Oh, they’re going to be there. I could look for Lisa. We actually just had a great time chatting there, which is great. It started our friendship really more there. That’s the good thing about one of these parties. It’s an excuse to hang out with people you actually wanted to hang out with. Craig: Now, if you are somebody who is going to your first premiere and you’re not expecting to know many people at all, it’s perfectly fine to go there. Don’t go alone because that’ll get awkward. Go there with somebody you can talk to, and inevitably, you will bump into somebody who will say something, and you might meet somebody, and it’s just like any other party. Feel free to compliment people who are involved in the movie. If it’s a famous person or it’s the director or whatever, somebody you want to get a selfie with, it’s cool. It’s fine. What you don’t want to do is just talk their ear off. They don’t want to talk to you. They don’t know you. They would much rather talk to people they know. It’s as simple as that. In the case of actors, other famous people love talking to famous people. John: A good conversation starter is, “Did you work on this?” If you don’t know, “Did you work on this?” Great. What was your problem? I really like that part of it. Or if they didn’t work on it, it’s like, oh, then why are you here? What did you like? All that stuff. What’s fun for you? Craig: What brought you here? John: What brought you here? Always a safe bet. Craig: How did you end up at this fun party? Then someone explains their connection. You explain yours. It just works like any other party. You described a different kind of party, though, which is what I would consider the Hollywood party, which isn’t an organized event by a studio. This is more like a producer, a director, an actor is having some big party at their big house. You know somebody who brings you. You’re going to your first– John: Good plus one. Craig: Yes. This is like a real party. Now what do you do? John: Walking back through examples of when I’ve done that situation, it’s more just like a normal party, which you’re basically just figuring out what is the point of entry for a conversation to have with somebody around me who looks interesting, who I want to talk with. That’s just a basic skill that’s not always easy to do. Craig: Certainly, you should have the awareness that unless you do know a lot of people there or you are, in your own way, a fascinating human being, nobody wants to talk to you. You have to earn people’s interest. Be cool and don’t push yourself on people. Certainly, allow people to mingle. Don’t monopolize anyone’s time. Just be nice about it. That’s all. Here’s another bit of advice. Those parties always start much later than you say, so show up later. Here’s something that happened to me at a party. I want to give people, this is my, you’re allowed to leave. It was the Golden Globes or something like that, I think. There was this big party that CAA was throwing at the Chateau Marmont. They have one of those big rooms that they open up. My agent was like, “You got to come.” I’m like, “Okay, I will.” John: I feel a dread. Those upper rooms, the Chateau Marmont, lovely view, but come on. Craig: It started well. I got in the elevator, and Tobey Maguire was there. I thought, “Oh, this is cool. I’m in an elevator with Tobey Maguire. He’s Spider-Man. This is awesome.” We get out of the elevator, and we walk over to the room, and the door opens. It was a joke. You know the Star Trek episode Trouble with Tribbles? John: Yes. Craig: Is that what they were called? John: Yes, Tribbles, yes. Craig: Yes, where they just fill every space. The door opened, and it was just humans. You couldn’t even go anywhere. It was the most packed nonsense I’ve ever seen. John: Sundance parties can be that way, too. Craig: Here’s what happened. I said, “Okay,” to myself, and this is like, it’s full of famous people. It’s full of executives, full of people I know. I’m just going to go in there, see my agent, show him that I came, and leave. I slowly make my way. It took me 15 minutes to get through this throng just to the outside area where I could breathe a little, hoping that he would be there. I did see him, but he wasn’t there. He was on the other side of the room. I went, “No, I’m done.” I spent another 10 minutes walking out. I spent 20 minutes at the party, walking in and walking out. You are allowed to leave. I did not want to be there. John: You know what? You sent a text like, “Hey, I couldn’t make it over to you.” Craig: Oh, I told him. I was just like, “Bro, you know me. You know this, I will not do this.” If you are at a party in Hollywood that is jam-packed with people, go. My feeling is like nothing good can happen here. There’s going to be an earthquake or a fire. That’s how my mind works. John: You’ve had experience with Hollywood parties, too. What are we missing? Drew: A little bit. My question was, I’m in this weird pocket where someone will be like, “Oh, I have to introduce you to this person who’s the director or someone, and then they don’t want to talk to me.” You have this weird introduction where you’re like, “Oh, hi, and there’s supposed to be this excitement,” and it very quickly fizzles. When do I leave? Because I understand what’s happening. I also, there’s another person here who’s introduced me, and I feel like I need to keep the ball in the air. Craig: In those situations, my advice would be when you get introduced to that person, tell them why you’re so happy to meet them. Say something about them and what they’ve done that you think is great, and shake their hand and say, “It was great meeting you.” Rather than, okay, you’re probably wondering who I am and what I’m about, because as you know, they’re not. Everybody likes being complimented. Drew: I keep trying to make a human connection, and I’m like, “Actually, I don’t think this is the time for that.” John: The person that’s trying to introduce the two of you, are they trying to get rid of you? Are they trying to slough you off, or did they come over to you and say, “Oh, Drew, I want you to meet this person?” They’re trying to be– Drew: In my situation, it’s usually a friend is the director’s assistant or something like that. It’s like, “I would love for you to meet this person who I’ve been telling you about.” It’ll be people who listen to the show, and they’re like, “I know my boss listens to the show. They’ll be super excited.” Craig: What are you going to do with that? It’s okay for you to say, “That’s cool. I’m good.” Because you can say, “Hey, I’ve had a lot of these,” and unfortunately, what happens is they’re like, “Oh, cool.” Then it’s just dead silence. I don’t want to do that. Drew: Well, but I think early career, there’s that scarcity mindset where you’re like- Craig: I should meet everybody. Drew: -“I should meet everyone.” You never know, and make those connections. You want to follow through on that, but you don’t. Craig: You know, really, it’s not a connection. Drew: Oh, no, not at all. Craig: If your friend, and I’m annoyed at your friend, but if your friend really wants you to meet somebody to get to know them because they think, oh, you two would really hit it off, well, why don’t they just have a fucking dinner party or something with eight people? That’s how you meet people. Drew: That’s much better. Craig: Not at some throngy event where 90% of the people who are there are there out of some weird social compulsion to be able to say they were there. That’s the thing about these parties that I find so dreadful, is that they’re not actually– Most people who are at these parties are not there to celebrate anything, nor are they there to commune with anyone. They are just there to be there so that they could say they were there. Nothing makes me less interested. I don’t go to a lot of parties, as you can imagine. It’s not my thing. John: Yes, and we don’t throw a lot of bigger parties here. We’ll have friends over for game nights and stuff like that. We had a party for our house turning 100 years old. Craig: That was nice. John: It had a purpose, and we had fun activities. We had a scavenger hunt. Things people can do. Craig: Melissa and I went on a scavenger hunt. We didn’t need to worry about getting stuck in a corner with somebody. That’s fine. It was like an open house-ish sort of style thing. I keep saying to myself, “Oh, I should have a party at my house.” Then I’m like, “Why? Just why?” John: Friends of mine moved up in the ranks and basically bought a house where they need to start throwing the party. It’s their agents who need to start throwing parties at their house. Craig: Oh, no. John: It’s like, I would not want– Craig: What does that mean? John: There’s an expectation they’ve got to entertain and do these things. Craig: Apparently, my house was quite the party house when Kevin Williamson ran the show over there. It’s a good house for a party. Maybe one day. Since I’m a guy who’s constantly trying to leave a party, our friend Derek throws a great party. I actually enjoy those because it’s sort of an annual event. John: Absolutely. I will know 30% of the people there, which is great. Craig: You run into the sort of people that you don’t even spend much time with, but you’ll see them at that party. John: Let’s talk through people who are like, “Oh, I know I’ve met this person. I don’t know where.” It’s so tough. We’ll do that. It’s so good to see you. Obviously, if you have a Mike at your side, say like, “Oh, hey, I’m Mike. I’m John’s husband.” That’s helpful. I just feel like we need to give a lot of grace for like, I cannot summon who you are. Craig: Everyone should say their name to everyone. I’m still dealing with the paranoia that when people who haven’t seen me in a while see me, they don’t know who I am, just because I shaved my beard off. I’ll say my name to you if you look like maybe you’re not sure. There is no crime in forgetting someone’s name, or forgetting their face, or forgetting that you’ve met them before. It is not a crime. Anyone who holds you accountable for that is jerk as far as I’m concerned. A jerk. It’s cool. You’re not that important. Nobody is. John: We were talking about Kevin Williamson a lot on this episode. Kevin Williamson, when I met him 30 years ago, whatever, four times in a row, he was like, “Oh, it’s nice to meet you.” I got a little annoyed at a certain point, but then I realized like, “Oh, I know who Kevin Williamson is because he’s like an Entertainment Weekly famous person, and I’m not. He has no reinforcement of who I am, whereas I knew who he was before I met him.” Craig: Or maybe he just forgets names and faces. Sometimes you will meet somebody, and they remind you of maybe four different people you might know. Now it’s like, I don’t know which one this is. That’s okay. John: We’ll talk about this when it lands on the show, but one of the things that I really appreciate about our movie is that obviously from Andy’s perspective, Miranda was a huge influence on our life, and Miranda has no idea who Andy was. It’s so classic and relevant and true. Craig: It is something that happens. As you get older, if you are in our business, if you have succeeded and hung on and achieved things, people will know who you are. You don’t always know who they are. Sometimes you should know who they are. I realize sometimes I’ll remember somebody that worked for me in some capacity, and I can’t remember their name. I think, is it dementia? No. There’s too many people. John: There’s too many people. Craig: There’s too many people. There’s long-term memory. There’s short-term memory, but there’s also mid-term memory. Mid-term memory is where I put the names of everybody on a crew. Five years from now, and if I’m working on something else, I won’t remember that because a new crew came to take the mid-term memory. John: So often I find myself searching email like, I know this person exists. Who is this person? It’s not memory. It’s a lot of this. Craig: You get the text from somebody, and you’re like, okay, it’s just a number. They’re like, “Hey, man, da, da, da,” and you have to scroll back and look for context clues. You’re like, “Oh, that’s who this is.” Drew: On the iPhone, there’s that little company thing, and I use that like crazy just to do context. John: Oh, nice. All right. Good hints from you. Craig: Well, I probably have chased people away from some Hollywood parties. They can be very glamorous. It’s cool to see famous people. I like it. It’s fun. John: Yes. We didn’t talk about clothes at all, which is good because– Craig: Oh, clothes. John: Clothes, whatever. Wear clothes. Here’s the one– Craig: Wear clothes. John: The one tip I can give you is that if it’s an annual thing, Google photos from the last year. If it’s a thing that’s being photographed for places– Craig: So you get the sense of– John: It’s like where the vibe, what the vibe is. Drew: That said, I went to a premiere a couple of weeks ago that was for a fighting movie, and everyone there was in all black. Every dude, all black. Black sweatshirt, black baseball cap, that kind of thing. It just felt like that was the dress code that we were all doing. It felt like the default. I had a blue and white shirt. Craig: And a pink hat. Drew: I didn’t get the memo. I don’t know if that’s a bad thing. I don’t know. Craig: It’s not. One of the great rules of life, no one’s thinking about you. You think everyone’s thinking about you. No one’s thinking about you. They’re only thinking about themselves. Drew: Yes, it’s true. Thanks, guys. Craig: Thank you. Party. The post The Flashforward Fallback first appeared on John August.

The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin. John: This is Episode 651 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we’ll do a live edit of a chapter for the forthcoming Scriptnotes book and answer a bunch of listener questions that have stacked up. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, card games. We’ve talked a lot on the show about word games and role-playing games, but I have no idea how Craig feels about poker and the like. Craig: Woohoo. John: Woohoo. But now, Craig, we can finally reveal what you’ve been up to, because people have been writing in to say, “Where the hell is Craig? It’s been four weeks since Craig has been on the show.” Craig: Where is Craig? John: Where is Craig? I think we can say this. We can’t say everything now, but we can say you were cast on this next season of Survivor, and so you’ve been off on an island in Fiji. I obviously can’t tell how you did, but wow, Craig, I’m so impressed. Craig: Got voted off first. Did I just ruin the show? There is nothing less likely than me being on Survivor. Maybe Love Island. That might be slightly less likely. John: I bring this up because Jon Lovett, who’s the host of Lovett or Leave It, a show that you were on, he went on Survivor, and that was crazy. Craig: Wait, he did the whole thing? John: He did the whole thing. He disappeared off the face of podcasting. It was like, where the hell’s Jon Lovett? Matt Rogers, who had filled in for you one time before, was filling in for him. Everybody was filling in for him. Craig: Wow. John: They revealed, oh, he’s on Survivor. Craig: Wow. I had no idea. My new neighbor, because I live near you now, and my across-the-street neighbor is Jon Favreau, not the actor director, but the podcaster, Pod Save America guy. He didn’t mention this. Was it a secret? John: It wasn’t a secret that he was on it. It was a secret that he was going on it. But once it was revealed that he was, basically, once he showed up in a promo for the new season on the Survivor season finale, everyone was like, “Oh my god, that’s Jon Lovett.” And so then the cat was out of the bag. Craig: Just to be clear, he wasn’t on the run of the season? He just appeared once? John: No, he’s going to be on an upcoming season of Survivor. He was gone for four weeks to be on Survivor, just like you were gone for four weeks. Apparently, that’s the official canon explanation of what Craig’s been up to. Craig: We’re getting there. John: You’ve been busy making a TV show. You’re making a different TV show. Craig: Making a different TV show. John: Honestly, just the same way that people get voted off of Survivor, not every cast member is going to survive your season of The Last of Us. That’s no spoilers. I suspect that’s going to happen, because it’s a show where bad things do happen to people. Craig: If anybody watched the first season, they know that death is in the air. People are going to die. Of course people are going to die. We killed almost everyone in Season 1. We really did. John: Absolutely. If you want to think the time jump, yes, that really did kill almost everybody. Craig: That killed really almost everybody. Then of the remaining people, anyone that we featured, whose name we gave you, there’s a decent chance they’d die. John: The clock starts ticking the minute they have a name. Craig, since you’ve been gone for a minute, I want to catch you up on what’s happened on the podcast since you’ve been gone, because I know you don’t listen to the show. Craig: True. John: Last week, Mike Schur came back on. Craig: Great. John: Mike Schur was fantastic, so good. Craig: Terrific. John: We talked a bit about locking pages and color revisions and that stuff, because he just finished a show for Netflix. We did all that. It never really occurred to him that he could just say no. But I want to keep this ball rolling in terms of just saying no, because you brought up before, maybe your next season you just won’t do those things anymore. Craig: I won’t. Interestingly, one of our first ADs, Paul Domick, listens to the show. He listened. He knows everything. He knows. John: He tells you what happened [crosstalk 00:03:45]. Craig: He tells me the things I said, which I forget. He said, “You want to unlock pages?” I’m like, “Yeah.” We had a conversation. Basically, the upshot was yeah, there’s really no reason to keep pages locked anymore, and there are a ton of reasons to keep them not locked. As long as the scene numbers stay locked, there is no reason. I’m not sure there is a reason even to assign colors to revisions at this point. Revision 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Just do levels. This way, you don’t have to come around to double color or something. You just go, “Oh, we’re at Revision Level 28.” John: I think we can accept that locking pages and color revisions were a very clever solution for the issues that were a problem 30 years ago. They’re not the solution we need right now. Craig: Brilliant solution, actually. I remember thinking, “Oh, this is so smart. Instead of having to print everything, we just take these two.” Yeah, we’re done with that. It’s over. John: What I would propose is, if you are a showrunner who is thinking about stopping locked pages and stopping color revisions, write in to us and let us know what you’re thinking and what your concerns are, or if you are a person who is responsible for production, so in feature films, the line producer, the first AD who is hearing this and excited or terrified, write in to let us know. What are we not thinking about? I want to make sure this momentum keeps building so other people feel like maybe we can stop this silly thing that we’re doing. Craig: We are stopping. I’m stopping. I’m just saying, it’s going to happen. I didn’t even realize that until this moment while we were talking that revisions in everything else are enumerated. Revisions for cuts, for visual effects shots, “Oh, we’re on V219.” Scripts should just simply be Draft 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and so on. Why would we not? John: You know what else is enumerated, Craig? Craig: What? John: The literal slate that claps in front of a take. Craig: That is enumerated. There’s time code on it. There are scene numbers on it. Everything has numbers. It is true that we assign letters sometimes. John: We use some letters. It’s true. Craig: But nobody else does colors. Nobody, period, the end. It was only because of different colored pages. That it. It’s over. We’re killing it. This is now what I do. Killing that. John: Part of our conversation about this idea of moving past locked pages and color revisions was really about this notion, like, there needs to be a central source of truth, like, what is it the hell that we’re shooting? John in Chicago wrote in with his experience working locations in Chicago. “In locations, we are responsible for informing production, the location, the public, and the police and the government of our parameters. One can easily see how a lack of centralized information puts us in a precarious position. The amount of time I spent hounding departments for exact information is incalculable. But more nefarious is the general disorganization, such as, no one told us that we were using simulated gunfire at 1:00 a.m. in the most dangerous neighborhood in America. People who actively use disorganization to avoid us knowing what we are doing, thus putting the crew and public in real danger, while knowing it is me, not them, who is responsible for the repercussions. In an industry so competitive, one major instance like this can make all the difference. My advice to producers with an assistant is to have them take minutes at all meetings, pack them up into single documents sorted by filming day, and distribute daily to departments.” Craig: I’m a little puzzled by this, I gotta say. John in Chicago is suggesting this as if this isn’t the standard operating procedure for everything and always has been. We have production meetings. In movies there’s a big production meeting, but there are tons of meetings for prep. The ADs will go through the script scene by scene with all the departments. Everyone will ask their questions. Everything like, for instance, gunfire and things like that are printed on the call sheet, especially when we’re dealing with firearms, blanks, cold guns, hot weapons, etc, all of this is documented at length across multiple, multiple meetings. I’m not sure what production John is working on, but yikes. John: This feels like a yikes to me. My guess is it’s not one of the Chicago shows, not one of the ongoing series, because they would have a whole protocol for this. My guess is that it’s some indie feature or something else that was shooting there and did not have its act together. I want to be sympathetic to John in Chicago. This was a bad situation. It puts you at risk, can put other people at risk. It should’ve never happened. That said, I feel like an ongoing production would recognize this and address it. This is the kind of thing, it would absolutely be on the call sheet. Craig: Yeah. There would’ve been a meeting where the locations department would’ve been present, along with special effects, along with props. Props typically handles weapons. It would be understood that there would be gunfire. Locations would be aware. They would take their own notes. It is not up to the producer’s assistant to document things for the locations department. I do not know what’s going on here, other than to say I don’t want anyone listening to this to think, oh, that’s how it goes, just people running around going, “Wait, we’re shooting stuff tonight?” No, that is not how that works. John: That’s not how it works. Also, while you were gone, Simon Rich came on the show. Craig: Brilliant. John: Simon Rich, delightful, so funny. We talked about his new book that’s coming out or actually will be out by now. We talked about really the differences between a story/sketch and a movie or a novel, because a person who’s writing short stories, he has to have a premise and development and a conclusion. The amount of energy going into it is just a very different thing. It’s a very different structure behind the comedic premise. It was a really good conversation. Craig: He’s a brilliant writer, super funny. I’m sorry I missed him. John: Aline was here, which is a “this kind of scene,” where we did farewell scenes, which was nice. It was also just looking at the whole range of farewell scenes and whether characters know it’s the farewell at the start of the scene. So often, one character knows it’s the farewell and the other character’s learning about it in the course of it. Characters are also aware that they’re in a farewell scene moment and that there are expectations built upon movies that they’ve seen themselves that they know they’re in. It’s a meta situation whenever you have a farewell. Craig: No question. That’s an interesting discussion. I’m sorry I missed that one. John: Also, we finally launched AlphaBirds. This is a game you played a bazillion years ago. Craig: Oh my goodness. In Austin, with you, I believe. John: Absolutely. Back then, it might’ve still been called Sparrow, but it’s now called AlphaBirds. We got the full trademark on it. If people want to play it, you can buy a copy at alphabirdsgame.com. We’re also on Amazon. We’re finally out there in the world, which feels really good. The final version of it is in a nice little box. It has little wooden tokens that you move on your cards. It turned out really well. In a world of Wordle and Scrabble and other things like that, it’s just a good game to play with friends. I will send you a copy up to Vancouver so you can play it with people on breaks. Craig: That’s fantastic. I love that. I’m looking at your website. By the way, the artwork and the style of the name is adorable and catchy. Well done there. John: Thanks. Craig: This looks like a great game for an airplane. This looks like such a good airplane game. Very cool. Exciting. John: Things have been getting done. Let’s do a little bit of other follow-up here. In Pay Up Hollywood over the course of years, we’ve talked about the need for assistants and support staff to be paid a living wage, pushing up to $20 an hour, $25 an hour. There’s reasons why it’s impossible to actually live in Los Angeles at California minimum wage. Hilary wrote in with her experience, which is unfortunately not what we want to see. Drew Marquardt: Hilary writes, “I’ve been working as an assistant for two years now, and I’m also a screenwriter. I finally purchased a Premium membership, and upon diving into the glorious backlog of episodes, I was enraptured by your discussion of assistant pay. Unfortunately, not much has changed. I can tell you both that I am still not making $20 an hour as a busy, dedicated, hardworking literary management assistant. I love my boss, and I like a ton of parts of my job, but it’s quite harrowing that I’m stuck at $19 an hour as I see my friends at some other agencies in other roles taking $23 an hour or more. “I started at $17 an hour two years ago when I came on board, and there were assistants making less than me who had been there for years. Now the tides have changed, and newer assistants are making more than me. We’re lucky that our company pays for our health care. I know of another management company that offers their assistants either a higher hourly rate with no insurance, or insurance with a lower rate. At a year or so, it’s traditional to get a bump, but there are other rules and politics that have kept me from asking for more. The higher-ups take note and do look down on you for asking for said raise. I have to say, I still consider myself one of the lucky ones, since my boss is so wonderful, but god, it sucks being paid so poorly.” John: Oy. Hilary, this is not exactly advice, but I want to contextualize what you’re feeling. To be frustrated at being paid $19 an hour is genuine and real. You should be paid more than that. The fact that you’re getting health insurance is a really good thing. I’m sure that’s what you’re weighing is how much per hour is that health insurance worth for you, is it worth searching for a different job that could pay more per hour but wouldn’t give you health insurance. If you’re 19 years old, that’s great. You’re at this period in time where you can live a ramen lifestyle. But the point we’ve been trying to make with Pay Up Hollywood throughout is that this shouldn’t be survival work. This should be the first rung of the ladder that lets you start climbing. It doesn’t feel like you’re being paid enough to start climbing. Craig: Hilary, I’m glad you’re listening. Now I feel bad that you’re paying $5 a month. I’m glad that you listen to those back-episodes. We never thought that we could impact Hollywood in such a way that every employer would hit the $20. I think we were saying $20 an hour was what we were going for. But I think a nearly direct result of our work was that the large agencies did increase their rates. Yes, when you know the other agency’s $23-plus an hour, that’s a sign that things can change, because that was not the case, what, four years ago, five years ago. The fact that assistants that are coming on now are getting higher rates, also a sign that there’s positive change. I’m a little concerned that you find yourself in a strange nook. You’re a little circumspect about it. It’s hard to tell why you just mentioned politics and other rules. But I think it’s fair to say, “My boss is wonderful, but also I should get paid more.” If your boss really is wonderful, she or he will stick up for you. Here’s the deal. If you’re making $19 an hour and you’re looking for another $4 an hour, and you’re working let’s say 60 hours a week, that is not an amount of money that is going to send your employer into red ink. It’s just not. I think it’s a fair thing, especially because you’re hurting. It’s not even just financially hurting, Hilary. I can tell that you’re also just – this doesn’t feel fair. That’s going to impact also how you approach the job and how you work there. You can say you’re one of the lucky ones, but I don’t think we should say, “Hey, my boss is a good person. That makes me lucky.” That’s supposed to be standard. John: Agreed. It’s a good reminder though, so I thank her for writing in, because it’s a reminder that things can improve. It doesn’t mean it improves for everyone. It doesn’t mean improves across the board for all parties. Craig: That’s right, especially, as is always the case, the smaller employers are always going to be the harder ones to get. There’s downsides to working for large mega corporations like CAA or something like that. But on the plus side of the large mega corporations, they probably do pay a bit more than some of the mom-and-pop shops. John: Hilary was looking through the back catalog. We’re doing the Scriptnotes book now, which is a look through well over 13 years of Scriptnotes, and putting it in book form. Craig, at some point when you are done shooting your show, you will get the whole manuscript to read through and do your edits upon. I thought I might take advantage of your intention at this moment to just do a little bit of a live edit of one of the chapters, so we can talk through how we go from transcripts to actual prose and sentences that make sense in a book. I’m going to share a screen here. This is going to be your first time looking at the chapter. This chapter comes from a couple different episodes we’ve talked about. In the book, we’ll probably link in a little sidebar to what episodes this came from. This I believe was a topic that you really wanted to focus on, because one of your frustrations has been that so often we talk about character as if they are a person by themselves, when really it’s their relationship that we care about. I would say maybe do you want to start reading and then we’ll stop at some point where you have a thought? Craig: Sure. “Harry and Sally. Buzz and Woody. Watson and Holmes. Indiana Jones may have his name in the title, but it’s his relationship with his dad that carries us through the third film.” Oh, right there, for instance, I’d probably say, “Indiana Jones may have his name in the third Raiders title.” Oh, I see, “carries us through the third film.” I see. There’s something odd about two names, two names, two names, then one name all of a sudden. John: Oh yeah, I see that. Craig: “A dozen different things can convince us to sit down and watch something, but we stay in our seats for the relationship we see on screen.” Then there’s a quote from me. Should I read the quote? John: Read your quote. Craig: “So often when I skim through screenwriting books, they talk about characters and plot. They don’t talk about relationships. I don’t care about character at all. I only care about relationships, which encompasses character.” Continue. I was just wondering, should it be “which encompass character.” John: It’s one of the continuous choices Drew and Chris and I are making as we’re going through even our direct quotes, because you say things differently than you would actually write them in. “Which encompass character.” Craig: Yeah, I think so. You can think of a relationships as a singular concept and then it’s okay. That’s probably what I was doing when I was talking. But this feels a little neater. “Studio executives make this mistake.” I would say, “Studio executives make a mistake.” “Studio executives make a mistake when they talk about character arcs. I hate talking about character arcs. The only arcs I’m interested in are relationship arcs.” John: Do you stand by that sentence? Craig: I do. Then it continues off the quote. “Consider the word chemistry and how often we apply it to the actors performing these relationships.” I don’t know if you can perform a relationship. John: Embodying these relationships? Craig: Engaging in these relationships? John: Yeah, but it’s- Craig: But they are performing it, aren’t they? John: But they are performing it. Craig: How about this: “How often we apply it to the actors bringing these relationships to the screen.” John: “To life on screen.” Craig: Yeah. “When chemistry is there, what do we… ” Oh, that should be, “How do we describe it?” “How do we describe it? Sparks. We feel that energy bouncing back and forth between them. And when it’s not there, we feel nothing. Chemistry is fundamentally the combination of elements that by themselves would be relatively stable. When you put them together, they create something volatile and new. That’s what we’re really talking about in relationships, that fresh substance created when characters are interacting and challenging each other.” That’s pretty good. Not all chemicals put together create something volatile, but I think they certainly create something new. If you were stuck with actual commenting – it depends on how far you want to extend the metaphor. I get what’s going on here. I think maybe some chemistry teachers in high school might get a little grouchy, but that’s fine. “Writers are emotional chemists. We select and combine characters and scenes, then apply heat to create something exciting, unstable, and potentially explosive.” Maybe I would add in heat “or pressure.” John: “Then apply heat and pressure to create something new.” Craig: Yeah, “and pressure,” yeah, because sometimes it’s heat and sometimes things are squeezing them. That’s good. John: You’re feeling a good launch into the relationships chapter? Craig: Yeah, this feels great. Should I finish with the rest of the page? John: Sure. Craig: The next thing says, “Establishing relationships. How do you get the audience up to speed on relationships that began before the movie started? Literally, how do you let the audience know the way these two people are related?” I don’t know if we need the word “literally.” John: Unfortunately, without the “literally,” we’re starting two sentences with “How.” You see that stack there? Craig: Mm-hmm. Let’s fix that. “How do you get the audience up to speed on relationships that began before the movie started? What methods do you use to let the audience know the way these two people are related? Are they siblings? Are they friends? Are they a couple? Are they ex-spouses?” Should we say “partners”? Is that more inclusive? John: Spouses can be partners too. Craig: I’m with you. John: It’s not gender-specific. Craig: Couple of married guys are like spouses. John: Spouses. Craig: “We have this wonderful opportunity when a movie begins. The audience is engaged. They’re leaning forward in their seat. They haven’t yet decided that this movie stinks. This is your invitation.” That sounds like it’s an invitation for us as opposed to the audience. John: It’s an invitation for the screenwriter to have fun. Craig: “This is your opportunity,” I think, “to have fun, to tease, or misdirect what relationships are.” Probably “the relationships,” right? “And then reveal them in exciting ways. Too often, as we read through Three Page Challenges, it feels like the screenwriter is working hard to establish relationships when it could be done more effectively visually.” It’s always tough when you got two L-Ys next to each other. “Could’ve been done more effectively-” John: “Through visuals.” Craig: “Visuals” is always tough. Maybe, “When it could’ve been done better visually.” John: “When it could be done better visually.” That? Craig: Yes. That’s parallel, “When it could be done better visually.” “Consider the following snapshot. You see four people seated at a table in an airport restaurant. They’re all African American. There’s a woman who is 35 and putting in eyedrops. There’s a man who is 40, a little overweight, who is trying to get a six-year-old boy to stay in his seat. There is a girl who is nine and playing a game on her phone. Your default assumption is this is a family.” I would probably put a “that” instead of a comma. “Your default assumption is that this is a family. They’re traveling someplace. That’s the mom, that’s the dad, those are the kids. That visual gave you all that stuff for free. Therefore, you can spend your time in dialogue doing interesting things with those characters, rather than establishing that they’re a family.” Maybe the word “now” instead of “therefore.” “You don’t need to have a character say ‘Mom’ or ‘Son’ or any of those annoying things that hit us over the head.” This is going to be a very good book, I think. John: I think this is going to be a really great book. What I wanted to talk for a minute is how we go from you and me having a conversation to something that feels like a synthesis of both of our voices, because there’s moments in here which I read as your voice and a little bit more my voice, but we’ve tried to find an effective middle ground. Things like, “They haven’t yet decided this movie stinks,” that was your voice. That’s literally taken from transcripts, from you. But on the whole, I think it feels like a synthesis of both of us talking. Craig: I agree. This feels informative. I can see here that this book is not trying to do what the transcripts do or what the podcast does, which is for two people to relate to folks at home in a personal way through conversation. This is a proper book that has, we’ll call, a neutral teacher voice. This is good. This is a good book. John: I think it’s going to be a good book. Even as you’re going through your edits there, what you’re finding is those moments that feel like that’s a little bit too much spoken John or Craig and not quite the written version of John and Craig. That’s really been some of the slog of this. This is a chapter that I’ve been poking at for two or three days to get – not full-day sessions – but to get stuff feeling right. Chris and Drew and Megana have done a heroic job assembling stuff together in a flow and a document, but then actually getting it to read like us is a more challenging thing. That’s been most of my job here. Craig: You guys are doing great. Finally, there’ll be a good book on screenwriting. John: I’m excited. This draft that we’re talking through right now is going in to the editor on Monday. Then we’ll get notes back from that. There’ll be more revisions. But the goal at this point is August 2025 for a book in people’s hands. Craig: That’s amazing. What you’re saying is Christmas 2025. What a great gift. John: Part of the reason why we picked August 2025 is it’s a good time for this kind of book, but we also believed that it’s going to be a time when you’re going to be available to promote it and I should also be available to promote it, because we would love for people to actually buy the book. Craig: I will indeed be available to promote it. What do we do to promote a book? I’ve never done that. John: We do some live events. We’ll probably do a live show where people can buy a ticket and they get a book as part of that. We might do a live show in Los Angeles. We might do one in New York. We’ll probably guest on a whole bunch of other people’s podcasts. We’ll do stuff to get it out that will try to seat it with the right smart people, who will review it and give us good reviews. One of the things we talked about off mic is who are we going to get to write the introductory chapter, the little preface from some other famous person. We’ll find who that person will be. Craig: I had some ideas. John: We’ll continue to discuss. I don’t want to spoil them on the air when we don’t get James Cameron to do it. Craig: He’s not going to do it. John: I don’t think he’s going to do it. We haven’t even gotten him on the show yet, so that’d be hard. Craig: He’s busy. John: He’s busy. The ideal person would be somebody who was like, “Oh, wow, they got that person,” but also who would listen to the show or at least know about the show. Craig, how often do people that you talk to in professional settings, they’re like, “Oh, it’s so weird hearing you in person, because I listen to you on Scriptnotes,” or, “I love Scriptnotes.” Do you get that a lot? Craig: I do. I’ve said this many times. Every time it happens, I’m shocked. I will be forever shocked. People generally seem to now know my face a little bit better. John: Yeah, also because when you do the after-the-episode interview things, that’s how people recognize you. Craig: Yeah. Now I’m quasi on TV for a little bit out of the year, so people are familiar with my face now. I never know how to take that. It’s probably not good. You remember when everyone was wearing a mask, we would just emotionally, mentally, visually fill in a blandly handsome or beautiful face? John: Yes, totally. Craig: Then you would see somebody without their mask and go, “What the hell?” I feel like that’s probably… John: Your mental auto-complete was much better than the actual text underneath that mask. Craig: I think people’s mind-image impression of you and me, it’s probably a disappointment when they meet us. John: I’m more often recognized by voice in those situations. We’ll be out at breakfast someplace, and I’ll be talking with Mike, and he will clock somebody who will turn in their seat like, “What?” He’s like, “This person’s coming over.” They’ve heard my voice, and they’re coming over to say hi, which is fine and lovely, all good. But then I’ve also been on a lot of Zooms lately with executives who I’m meeting for the first time. It’s like, “Oh, it’s just so weird seeing a face with a voice.” Like, “Yeah, there’s actually a human being here. Now, I’m going to pitch you a movie. Please buy my movie.” Craig: It would be nice if the romanticization of you carries over and they just start writing some checks. You like my voice so much, wait until you see my writing. John: I think I did actually say on a pitch this last week, I was like, “Yeah, and now I’m going to use that voice to tell you a story.” Craig: Nice. John: Let’s answer some listener questions that will probably be in the sequel book. Craig: Great. John: We’ll start with Carly, who asked a question about personal stories. Drew: Carly writes, “I have recently started writing a series based on my own life events. It’s not exactly the same but includes some similar themes and such. I’ve run into the problem of who the other characters will be in this series. I’m finding it a creative struggle to make up brand new characters and relationship dynamics. Alternatively, if I choose the similar-to-my-life route, I worry I may accidentally paint real people in bad lights. I feel very inspired to write this series, but this debate has been getting in the way of my brain. Do you have any insights?” John: Craig, always valid to write about your own experience. But your own experience doesn’t involve people around you, and so you have to make choices about how much you’re going to portray them in any story that you’re telling. Craig: Carly, you’re right to be a bit terrified here, because you have two obligations. You have an obligation to the people that are around you. You also have an obligation to the truth. Truth is obviously something that goes through a process when you’re fictionalizing something. But you’re still going to have to see somebody, look them in the eyes, or if they are no longer with us, look their children in the eyes, and say, “I did this.” It is very tricky to do. I think everybody’s followed the hoopla and controversy surrounding the Netflix series Baby Reindeer. We especially now have to be concerned about this, because back in the day, you’d put a movie out, “Oh, it was real,” and then 20 years later somebody would write an article in The Atlantic saying, “Not really.” 20 minutes after something becomes popular, people are investigating. It is a very tricky thing to do. I would start with the question, am I sure I need to do this? You may be inspired to do this, but do I need to do this? Am I maybe giving this extra weight because I feel like I know a lot of it already because I’ve lived it, as opposed to trying to do something else? I would weigh it very carefully. Then if you commit, commit. John: We’ve had some great guests on previous episodes who I think are worth going back to revisit. I’m thinking about Mike Birbiglia, Alex Edelman, both talking about how they use their own stuff that actually really genuinely happened to them in their writing, in their work, and yet they’re also careful to keep their own real-life people out of their stories to the degree it makes sense to. They’re also up front about the fact that they are re-framing certain events to have them make narrative sense. They’re not trying to be documentarians. They’re not trying to fact-check every little thing. What they’re really doing is they’re telling a story that is inspired by things that actually happened to them. They’re not trying to literally do journalism. That’s the balance you need to find there. What is it about this story that’s inspiring you to tell it? Is that central character, your protagonist, really you or is it a person who is like you? If it’s not literally you or a person like you, likely the people around that central character are not going to be the same people that existed in your real life. Just give yourself permission to let go of some of those anchoring points of, this is exactly how it really happened. Craig: It sounds like Carly’s struggling with that very issue. She’s struggling to figure out how to fill in those gaps where she removes the reality of what occurred and replaces it with, as she says, brand new characters and relationship dynamics. It can very quickly turn into this strange fish with feathers. It’s real. It’s not real. It’s partly real life. People will be able to tell if there are seams between what feels effortless and true and what feels contrived. All I can say is I commiserate. I’ve thought about writing some things that are connected to my personal experience. I’ve had the same debate in my brain. This is a natural thing. I would think twice, measure quintuply, and cut once. John: Corey has a question about cold opens. Drew: “Over the weekend, I saw two summer movies. Both had me thinking of how features use cold opens. One starts with a five-minute montage establishing the protagonist’s family history and life-changing moment that defines her character flaw to be overcome. The other took an hour before the lead actress appeared on screen to drive the film to its narrative end. This left me thinking, how much backstory is too much versus what’s essential to get to the film’s main story? Also, are there any screenwriting tools or tips or tricks to make sure we’re not bloating our story with unnecessary context or visuals or what have you?” Craig: John, it’s an interesting question Corey’s asking, because there’s two aspects. One is, where should the backstory go? The second question is, how much is too much, and how do we slip that stuff in there in a way that feels informative and valuable? John: I wonder if Corey is mistaking backstory for really the first act. It says, “It took one hour before the lead actress appeared on screen to draw the film to it’s narrative end.” I doubt there was really a full hour of backstory. It was a first act that took place in the past, but it was the same character moving forward, and that was the nature of how it works. At a certain point though, you have made a contract with your audience that this is the story I’m telling you, that this is not just the past, but it’s actually the question I’m proposing to you. This is the thing the character’s going after. You’re saying this is the engine of the movie, and you’ve revealed that to the audience. It’s not going to be generally an hour into your movie. It’s going to be pretty quick in, because we’ve talked so much on the podcast about how you have those first 10 minutes or so where the audience will go with you anywhere. But at a certain point they’re going to say, “I don’t know what’s happening here. I don’t know how to watch this movie.” Too much backstory that feels like it’s not connected to a forward-moving plot, it’ll become a problem. Craig: I agree with you. I think Corey is conflating a couple of things here. There’s background, which is different than backstory. Background is, okay, what is the context of this person’s life? The first 10 minutes of a movie, traditionally, you meet the character in their normal life. You get their background. Shrek begins with an understanding that he’s an ogre, he was driven away, he lives in a swamp, he’s alone, everybody hates him. That’s background. Backstory to me is something that is told to you after you already know somebody, and then they reveal something about their past that recontextualizes for you who they are right now. That’s very different. Screenwriting tools, tips, and tricks. The number one tool, tip, and trick I have for you is to make it interesting. If it is interesting, then people will like it. It will be particularly interesting as backstory if it makes us see somebody in a very different way. I wrote an episode of Mythic Quest called Backstory. John: Yes, and starred in it. Craig: I don’t know if I would say starred in it, but I had a small part. But the purpose of that episode, Rob McElhenney wanted to tell a story about a character who is part of the comic cast, one of the broadest characters they had. That’s an interesting idea, to take somebody that really does work as a full joke character who doesn’t have dramatic stories built around them, and then go, “Let’s actually tell a dramatic story about this person.” We have a running joke about how he’s an alcoholic. We have a running joke about how he lives in the office, in a closet. We have a running joke about how he’s basically an emotional wreck and lonely. Now, what if we took that all seriously? We certainly have this endless joke that he’s a pompous writer who is obsessed with giving characters backstory in a hacky way. That inspired the idea of saying, okay, what if we told the story, so the next time you see that character, as ridiculous and over the top as he is, you’ll see a human being there. That’s interesting. It’s less interesting to get backstory on people that you know plenty about. John: Agreed. I think one of the reasons why backstory gets a bad name sometimes is that, done poorly, it has just stopped the forward momentum of the plot and the story. It’s just like, okay, we’re going to take a pause here and just watch this thing and then come back to where we left off. If it has not changed the dynamics of the present tense, there’s really no reason for that. It’s not serving a purpose in your story. Craig: That’s right. Typically, backstories are relayed from one person to another. It’s not done as a little mini movie. You’re on a date. You’re walking around. You say, “I never told you about blah da da da,” and that’s relayed. But there are times where the backstory is kept from other characters and is only relayed to us in the audience. None of the characters on Mythic Quest were there to see the backstory of that character. We were. We have a privileged view at that point forward. We feel a little bit more sympathetic or empathetic with that character than everybody else around them. John: We have a question from Football Dummy about sharing credit. Craig: Great name. Drew: Football Dummy writes, “I recently pitched a show to a major studio, and they want to move forward with developing and purchasing the show. The idea is one I conceived about a decade ago and have been nurturing it over the years. But at a certain point, I recognized that I needed a potential collaborator due to the fact that it is partially set in the world of football, which I am not well versed in. But the other aspect of the show is loosely based on personal experience, which is really the heart of the show. “My collaborator has been great, and he asked if I’d be willing to share a co-created by credit with him. The truth is the football beats of this pilot do need to be punched up. Should I share this credit with him? I’m having a hard time quantifying how a 10-year endeavor can be shared with someone who’s just been in the arena with me for a year. I’ll say that he has been instrumental as a producer in moving the show forward and aligning me with the studio to begin with.” John: Fundamentally here, the question is, at what point is someone helping you out versus being a fully ampersanded collaborator that they deserve co-created credit with you on this thing. There’s no magic formula. This isn’t even an arbitration-able kind of situation. This is what is the nature of your relationship? Are you boyfriend and girlfriend? Are you going to get married? What is this thing between the two of you? You have to make a decision. They have to make a decision. You have to figure out together, is this a partnership you want to fully engage in to make this into a show? Craig: There are a lot of ways to go about this, but boils down to basically are you the sort of person who’s going to go along to get along, or are you the sort of person who’s like, “No, that doesn’t feel quite fair.” The problem that you have, Football Dummy, is that you do need help. You can’t do it on your own. You cannot create the show on your own, because you’re missing quite a bit of knowledge and insight about something essential to it. It’s set in the world of football. Let’s use the example of Ted Lasso. If you have an idea about a positive person coming into a workplace and using the power of positivity to inspire people around him, even though the traditional environment in those situations is someone abusive and demanding, and you want to set it in the world of soccer, but you don’t know anything about soccer, it’s probable that, yeah, the person that comes to help you set it in the world of soccer is co-creating it with you. It’s important to understand, co-creator is a credit that’s there and then it’s just sort of there. But it is not an ongoing writing credit. The scripts will need to be written. There is going to be an executive producer or many who are running the show. Also, as is the case with almost every television show, one or two people ultimately will be recognized as the prime movers of the show, regardless of the credits. For instance, if I were to say, “Who are the co-creators of Silicon Valley?” you’d probably say Mike Judge and Alec Berg. John: Berg, yeah. Craig: But they’re not. The co-creators of Silicon Valley are listed as Mike Judge, John Altschuler, and Dave Krinsky. But shortly after the act of co-creation, John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky I think left, and Alec Berg joined. Alec and Mike ran that show, wrote lots of episodes, directed lots of episodes from that point forward. It’s a credit that indicates the moment of birth. I’m not sure in your situation it’s worth going to war over this. Feels like this person is a good collaborator. They are helping. The fact that you worked on it for 10 years – you said, “It’s an idea I conceived about a decade ago,” and then you say “a 10-year endeavor.” It’s not quite the same, is it? Then also, “someone who’s just been in the arena with me for one year.” One year’s a lot. Also, this isn’t a quantity game. It’s a quality game. My instinct would be to be generous here. John: I think generous is the right instinct here. We don’t have all the information about who this collaborator is. If this person is not really a writer but is actually just a person who knows a bunch about football but cannot write a scene, that gives me a little bit more pause. The fact that Football Dummy pitched and set up this show without this person does make it a little more cleanly his or hers, but I don’t know. I think you have to really look at what is going to be the right choice for you and for this show. My instinct is to probably be generous. If you think this person has been helpful not just to this point, but helpful going forward. A question from Daniel. Drew: Daniel writes, “As someone who’s just had their first taste of professional success writing a feature for Lifetime, I’m fearful of mismanaging my next moves and stalling out or getting trapped in a loop of financing my own short films in between non-union romantic comedy rewrites. How can I capitalize on this minor inertia I’ve generated for myself?” Craig: This is an interesting one, John, because Daniel’s defining a loop that I didn’t quite know was a thing. But I guess the bigger issue is he’s done a feature for Lifetime. How do you convert? How do you capitalize? John: Listen, you’ve had something made. You’ve had something produced. It was for Lifetime, but still, it counts. Your name is on a screen someplace. When you’ve just written scripts and nothing’s been produced, it’s like, can my work even stick to the screen? There’s this weird sense of am I even producible? You now know you’re producible. It sounds like you’ve made short films yourself. You presumably have reps. Talk to them about what rooms they think they can get you into, who you can be meeting with so you can get that next job and the next job and the next job, in places that can be beyond the Lifetime. Get into the Netflixes. Get into the other places, because having some success, a little bit of heat is really good. This is a moment to capitalize on it. Craig: I would suggest, Daniel, that it’s important to stop doing non-union work. First of all, you really aren’t allowed to. Pretty sure. So stop. If you are in the Writers Guild, you are not allowed to do non-union writing in areas that the Writers Guild covers. If you want to go work on an animated film, sure, the Writers Guild doesn’t have full jurisdiction over stuff like that. But romantic comedies that are made for television or film, if they’re being done here in the United States, you in fact are definitely not allowed, per the Writers Guild working rules, to do that stuff. Step 1, don’t work on non-WGA stuff. It’s bad for you, and it will undermine your professional status. John: Absolutely. We’re assuming, Daniel, that you are an American writer working on a US-based production. If you’re Irish and you did an Irish movie for Lifetime, different rules. Craig: Different deal. Then the way to capitalize, I guess, on this minor inertia is to use the opportunity now to show people some of the things you’ve written. Hopefully, you’ve written some other things. If you need to pay your bills, as almost everyone does it would probably be better – hang on, Daniel, get ready – to write another feature for Lifetime than it would be to finance your own short films or work on non-union stuff. Financing short films is a fantastic way of lighting somebody on fire. We’ve talked about the short film thing before. If you can make a little short film and it costs you, I don’t know, 1,000 bucks, and you happen to have 1,000 bucks, great. Spending real money of your own on a short film, that’s bad. John: I think you have to look at anybody that’s spending on a short film as like, “This is money I’m spending that I know I’m not going to get back, in the pursuit of some greater goal.” If your greater goal is to show that I can direct, then that’s a valid goal. But as a way to show my writing ability, no. Craig: I agree. Also, Daniel, again, hang on. You wrote one Lifetime movie. The next one will be better. There is no shame in any Guild-covered work, as far as I’m concerned. Your craft will get better. You probably learned a lot seeing your first work on screen. It will make you a better writer. Convert that. Make some money. While you’re making some Lifetime money, use the fact that you’re a working writer now with representatives, that are probably pleased with the fact that you’re generating income for them as well, to try and get some of your own work through the door or get some pitches in or get some open writing assignment meetings and just work it. John: My friend Rex writes children’s books. He writes middle-grade and some young adult fiction. One of the things I admire so much about Rex is he has his list of here are the 30 things, here are my 30 ideas, here are the 30 books that I want to write. He will, with his reps, go out and figure out homes for each one of them. He’s always stacked up with four books he needs to write. But he gets some written and he gets them in, there’s always something under his fingers. That maybe needs to be what Daniel is thinking about is, what are the movies that I want to be writing? Who are the places I should be meeting with and just going in there and systematically finding homes for those movies. Because if you have written a thing for Lifetime, Lifetime seems like its own brand, but Netflix has a whole department that is just that. If you get in there and you’re talking with them, you have five things to pitch them. Find the one that they want to hire you to do, and do it for them. You may not want to do this for the rest of your life, but getting a few things under your belt to show that you can make stuff is going to be a huge service for yourself. Craig: Agreed. Agreed. John: Let’s take one last question. Zach in Toronto. Drew: Zach in Toronto writes, “Have you ever written a script where you strongly disliked your protagonist or one of the major characters of the piece?” John: Craig, I can think of one example of this. It’s a movie I wrote for the wrong reasons. I wrote it just out of pure anger about some career stuff that was happening and as a middle finger to certain forces around me. I really did not like the central hero. I was trying to prove that I can write in a genre that I was not being considered for. I guess I did dislike the protagonist. Spoiler, it didn’t turn out great. Craig: Was it me? John: Yeah, I think it was. Actually, it was all about how Craig disappears off the grid for a while, then he comes back, yes. Craig: That MF-er. I have to say, Zach, I don’t think I have. I have written some characters that are awful. Thinking, for instance, of the character of David in Season 1 of The Last of Us, who’s just horrible. It seems to me the only way to write any character to be engaging and interesting and challenging is for that character to believe in what they’re doing and saying. They need to make an argument. They need to make a good argument, at least an argument that feels correct to them. They need to be committed. That means as I occupy that space, I turn certain values off and I turn certain values on. There are people out there that are wearing MAGA hats and stuff – a lot of them. I don’t like that. I’m not like them. I don’t want to be like them. But I can write that character. I could get in their head, and I could turn things off and turn things on. Of course, as a human being, I know that in almost all cases, when they put the MAGA hat on, they’re not doing so out of this dry political analysis. They’re doing so out of emotional response, needs, and drives. That’s universal to us all. How does the fear in you turn into putting a MAGA hat on? It’s not even a question of like or dislike your protagonist or the antagonist or any character. You have to be that person when you’re writing them. You just have to be them. It’s funny; I’m not a good actor. I’m fine. John: You’re a fine actor. Craig: I’m fine. No one’s nominating me for anything. I watch good actors all day long up here on our show. I’m watching Pedro Pascal. I’m watching Bella Ramsey do what they do. I’m watching Kaitlyn Dever. They become people in an incredibly thorough way, in an incredibly believable way. I can’t do that like them. But I can do it with words. That’s where I do it. I would say, Zach, if you strongly dislike your protagonist, I think you may have not gotten under the hood of why they are who they are and why they want what they want. John: I also wonder, why are you writing this? It’s such a fundamental question. Why did you choose to write this thing with this character you don’t want to be with? Because you’re going to be with that person for months and months, you’ve got to learn to find what’s interesting about that, watching and having a space with that character. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article that I was going to save for a How Would This Be a Movie, but there’s not a story there. But it’s really interesting. This is Max Bearak writing for New York Times. Headline is “AI Needs Copper. It Just Helped Find Millions of Tons of It.” It’s about this new deposit of copper ore that they were able to find in Zambia. It’s a mile underground. Copper is, of course, essential for making all the electronic stuff that we need to make a lot more of; for batteries, for computers, for everything else we need to do. The article talks through how they’re actually tracking muons, these subatomic particles that pass right through the earth. But by looking at how they’re displaced, you can find big sources of underground metals, including copper. We crap on AI, I think reasonably, for all the crappy things it does. That’s generative AI that is taking potentially work of writers and artists for their own purposes. But the truth is, AI can be really good at finding patterns in things that humans can’t spot. This AI system can find these weird fluctuations that reveal, oh, there must be a giant pile of copper a mile underground, and now we will find ways to dig it out. All that said, this is in Zambia, which is one of the poorest nations on earth. It’s a real question, how do people of Zambia benefit from this giant amount of copper that was found in their land. It embodies all of the issues of the future and the past and colonialism, all in one nice little bundle here. The article scratches at it, but it’s just a fascinating space I think to look at this moment that we’re in. Craig: First of all, I guess, a tip of a hat to this company’s name, KoBold. John: That’s the other reason I want to talk to you about this. KoBold, of course, is the mining character, the little mining monsters in Dungeons and Dragons lore. Craig: These guys are clearly dorks, although we knew that already, because they were using AI to track muons to find copper, but certainly our kind of dorks. I think the use of AI here feels like an extension of the kind of analysis that we first were able to do when the original computers were set up. People were running punch cards into computers to get things done faster that in theory could be done if you had a billion years. That makes sense to me. It’s really interesting to see – just looking at the images in this Times article, you are immediately struck by what’s going on here, which feels like an all too familiar story. There are fresh-faced White people looking at computers and screens and whiteboards, and then there are Black people who are lugging stuff around. They don’t look like they own anything, nor do they look like they’re going to benefit at all. The state of Zambia owns 20 percent of this mine. But African governments are not generally known for their stability, nor their service to the people that they govern. The article is questioning how that 20 percent ownership – 20 percent of what they’re saying could be billions of dollars – is in fact going to benefit the people of Zambia, or will it merely benefit the people that run the government of Zambia, or at least the state mining company. If past is prologue, this is not going to go well. But maybe, fingers crossed, it could work well for the people of Zambia. It is a very poor nation. John: For a different project, I was having to do some research on copper mines. The copper mines are fascinating, because it’s not the surface strip mine thing that we’re used to. It’s a very, very deep shaft. It doesn’t actually require that many people. There’s a lot of automation behind it. It’s not going to be a great work-maker for the people of Zambia. It’s really going to be about the ore coming out and the money coming out that’s going to be benefiting the country, rather than people with jobs. Craig: It literally would be, “Okay, we’re going to use all this money to build better schools, better hospitals, raise the wage, the minimum wage for people who do work, and just improve quality of life.” It wouldn’t take much in a country like Zambia to do that. I hope that the people that run KoBold are, like so many of us who play DnD, kind. John: Craig, a little sidebar here, KoBold, which is the name of this company but is also the little lizardy dragon-worshiping creatures in Dungeons and Dragons, you realize that KoBold is actually the same word as “goblin”? They’re actually etymologically the same way. In certain countries it became goblins, and in certain countries it became kobold. Craig: I only knew this because you’ve told me this. You’ve told me this before. That’s fascinating. It’s also a little upsetting, because kobolds and goblins are not the same. John: They’re so different. They’re little creatures, but they’re very distinct in DnD lore. Craig: Different stat blocks, guys. John: Different stat blocks. Craig: Different stat blocks, linguists. But it makes total sense. John: What do you got for a One Cool Thing? Craig: John, every now and then, I do a little One Cool Thing for my diabetes friends out there. Protein bars are often disgusting. John: They can be. Craig: But they’re very useful. The useful kinds for people who are trying to manage their blood sugar are the kinds that are, of course, low in sugar. Those are the ones that taste the absolute worst. There is one brand – and I don’t know if this is in the US, but it’s definitely here in Canada – that is fantastic, I think. I think the brand is Love… John: Love Good Fats, I think. Craig: This bar that I’m looking at is Love Good Protein. It’s cookie dough flavor. It’s actually really good. You can hear the wrapper going crinkle, crinkle. John: Absolutely. Craig: When we look at the nutritional information, in one bar there are 21 carbohydrates, but the good news is that two of those carbs are fiber, 16 of those carbs are sugar alcohols, which are altered sugar molecules that we cannot digest. There are two grams of sugar in this bar, which is negligible. It actually tastes good. I don’t know how they do it. Sometimes when I eat these things, I think we’re going to find out later. But this one is- John: The input is delightful; the output is not. Craig: I haven’t had stomach problems. It’s really good. John: Good. Craig: If you’re watching your carbs for any reason, Love Good Protein, cookie dough flavor, outstanding. John: Sounds great. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Tim Englehard. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to [email protected]. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies and hats. They’re all great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. If you want to get a copy of AlphaBirds, you’ll find that at alphabirdsgame.com. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on card games. Craig, it’s a pleasure having you back. Craig: So good to be here. [Bonus Segment] John: Craig, so this topic, in a roundabout way, came because I finally got a Steam Deck, which you had recommended a Steam Deck, because there was a Steam game I wanted to play, that I could not play on the Mac, or I couldn’t play on the Mac without terrible black magic stuff that I did not want to do to my Macintosh. I got a Steam Deck so I could play on it. It’s actually a card game that I’m playing on Steam called Balatro. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it yet. It is a fun card game that is taking the hands of poker but using them in a very different way. You’re trying to build all these poker hands and collect points from it. It’s a very smartly done game. But I realized that you and I have not talked about card games ever. We play DnD every week, but other people play poker, they play hearts and rummy and euchre. What is your history with card games? Craig: When I was a kid, I would play gin rummy with my grandmother. That was her game. She played that with my grandfather. They lived with us. As far as I could tell, my grandparents spent their retirement just playing that one game. They would keep track of who won. I don’t know what for. I don’t know what the ultimate point was. But it was so much fun to go down there and play, particularly with my grandmother, who would get so flustered when she lost. It was fantastic. Grew up playing that. When the poker craze hit, I started playing poker, and I played a lot. There was a game with some friends. We played every week. I would play online. Mostly hold ‘em, but also variants. Omaha hi-lo is a fun one. I also learned to play bridge. My wife taught me. Then we would play with her parents, who were extraordinarily good bridge players. In their day, they actually were part of some circuit. They were just frighteningly good. I would usually pair with her dad, and she would pair with her mom, and then off we would go. I got super into bridge for a while. If I go to a casino, usually I’m going to want to be social and play blackjack. But I’ve gone and sat down at a hold ‘em table and played. It’s fun. John: I grew up playing Casino with my mom, which is a pretty simple card game. It’s not trick taking, but you’re taking what’s on the table. We would play also gin or cribbage, another fun building up to fives kind of game. Then a certain point I learned to play pinochle. I would play it with my mom, my dad, my grandmother, my nana when she was around, my brother. Pinochle’s a great game. I’m not quite clear that we played the rules everybody else – I guess we did play the rules everybody else played, but I would look it up in books and it would seem vastly different. It wasn’t until the pandemic that I would play pinochle – Mike and I played pinochle with my mom online – and realized this is actually exactly the game that we played before. Pinochle I’d highly recommend to people who have not tried it before. It’s a very smart game. In junior high we would play hearts sometimes at lunch. Hearts is another fun trick-taking game. Craig: I love hearts. John: Love some hearts. Craig: Spades? John: Spades I didn’t know so well, but we loved hearts. Then in college, for the first time, I learned euchre, which is a very Midwestern thing. Do you even know what euchre is? Craig: I do, although I don’t think I’ve ever played it. But it’s one of those forerunner games like whist. John: Absolutely. This coming week we’re actually having a euchre party at a friend’s house. Megana will be joining us, because also, as an Ohioan, she was indoctrinated into the cult of euchre. We’ll be playing that with her. Craig: Is that the game that her mom plays with all the aunties? John: I don’t think so. I think it’s probably a different game. But I’ll check with her to see what the game is that she plays with her- Craig: Maybe they play mahjong. It might be mahjong. John: They might play mahjong. Here, as we talk, I’m going to text Megana and see what game they play. I’ve never played bridge. My parents played bridge growing up. I always admired what that was like, because they would have bridge tables, card tables they would set up, and then they would have six different couples over. It was the most social I ever saw my parents be. Other than Friday night bowling, it was the most I saw them hang out with other adults. Craig: I think you would love bridge. It’s a little intimidating at first, but it really shouldn’t be. In its own way, it’s a bit like chess, in that, okay, this does this, this does this, this does this. Great. Then you start playing and you start going, “Okay. Okay, I’m starting to see the interesting ways this works.” I think you would be very good at it. You have the right mind for it. John: Absolutely. I know basically in bidding you’re trying to communicate information to your partner with a very strict set of rules behind it. Craig: There are conventions. John: There are conventions. That’s right. Craig: There are certain bids that mean exactly what they mean, and then there are certain bids that mean I need you to bid something back that tells me information. There are contrived bids that don’t mean anything, other than to say, “How many aces do you have? How many kings do you have?” The fun in bridge really is at some point you’re doing some kind of mind reading with your partner, that plus a little bit of luck, and then careful management of where you start. When you’re in charge of the board, and you’re going to play a card, do I play it from my hand or do I play it from my partner’s hand, if they’re the dummy? It doesn’t take long to learn. The other thing about bridge which is similar to blackjack is you got a cheat sheet. You can have a cheat sheet. There are these place mats they make for bridge, where you can just go, “Okay, here’s how I analyze my hand. Here’s how I bid, based on this or this or this. Here’s what their response means. Here’s what I should do then,” which helps a lot. John: I texted Megana as we were talking. She says gin rummy. Craig: Oh, gin rummy, so what I was playing with my grandma. There you go. John: Global sensation. Craig, always nice to have you back. Craig: Great to be back. Thanks, John. John: Thanks. Links: AlphaBirds #PayUpHollywood Scriptnotes Episode 427 – The New One with Mike Birbiglia and Scriptnotes Episode 640 – Can You Believe It? A.I. Needs Copper. It Just Helped to Find Millions of Tons of It. by Max Bearak for the New York Times Love Good Protein Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt! Check out the Inneresting Newsletter Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription! Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram John August on Threads, Instagram, X and Mastodon Outro by Tim Englehard (send us yours!) Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Email us at [email protected] You can download the episode here.The post Scriptnotes, Episode 651: The Live Edit, Transcript first appeared on John August.

The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you are listening to Episode 649 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, which ideas are inherently funny? We’ll discuss what makes a comedic premise and how you develop and execute upon that idea. To do that, we have a very special guest. But first, Drew, we have some news and some follow-up. Drew Marquardt: We do. We’ve talked about the quest to make a Harry Potter series, and the uncomfortably public search for a showrunner. John: As a reminder, they said, “Oh, we’re gonna make a Harry Potter series and we’re gonna go through a series of rounds of different writers who might become the showrunner. It got kind of public in a way that made me feel eugh. Drew: It was a bake-off, right? John: Yeah. Drew: We have news that Warners has made their pick. It’s Francesca Gardiner of Succession along with director Mark Mylod, who also did Succession and Game of Thrones and The Last of Us and all sorts of stuff. They seem like a really good team to do that. I would say going into this, I was skeptical that anybody would want to step up to do this, especially in the bake-offy situation, but it looks like they ended up with some really talented people. I wish them luck. I think it’s gonna be a hard road ahead, but we’ll see what they’re able to make. That Harry Potter series will eventually probably come to your screens. Second bit of news is very, very local here. For the last 20 years I’ve had this blog, johnaugust.com, that we reference every week. One of the things I’ve done on the blog over the years is have these little short snippets of scripts in there as examples, for like, here’s an example of dialogue, here’s what this looks like. They’re just these little boxes that show a little bit of screenplay format. To do that, we created this thing called Scrippets, which Nima Yousefi, who works for us, initially created. It’s super useful. It’s a plugin that you can install through WordPress. It’s been really great and useful. The trouble is time moves on, and the plugin is no longer working well under the most recent versions of WordPress. Somebody out there listening probably does this for a living or as a hobby and has created WordPress plugins. If you are that person and you would like to step in and update this plugin for us, that would be fantastic. I’m sure there’s somebody out there who knows what they’re doing and could get this working. Scrippets, by the way, became the whole basis for plain text screenwriting. It has a long legacy, so you would be helping continue that legacy. If you’re that person and you want to help us out, just email Drew, [email protected], and he will be the person who can point you in the right direction. With that done, it’s time for our main guest. Simon Rich is a writer and showrunner who created the series Miracle Workers and Man Seeking Woman and the film American Pickle. He’s also an author, who’s written novels and short story collections, such as Spoiled Brats, Hits and Misses, and New Teeth. His new book, Glory Days, is out July 23rd. Welcome to the program, Simon Rich. Simon Rich: Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. John: You have twice been my One Cool Thing, although Craig’s read your books and liked them too. Way back in Episode 179, which was the conflict episode, I talked about Spoiled Brats. In particular, one of my favorite short stories of all times is Gifted, a thing that I probably go back and read every year or two. I think it’s just such a brilliant short story. Simon: Thank you so much. It really means a lot to me. Big fan of this show and a fan of your writing. It’s just thrilling to hear that the work resonates with you, truly. John: For folks who have not read Gifted, the premise of it is that essentially this couple gives birth to what’s clearly the antichrist, clearly a demonic creature, and they’re so obsessed with getting it into the best private schools in New York City. I want to talk about the comedic premise and how we get into all that and why it’s a short story versus something else. But before we do that, I’d love some background on you, because I know you from your writing, but I don’t know basically anything about you. If you can tell us the backstory of Simon Rich. Simon: The backstory, I grew up definitely obsessed with comedy, for sure. I would say particularly premise-driven, absurdist sketch comedy, Kids in the Hall, Mr. Show, The State, the chunk of SNL that was after Update where you were allowed to be a little bit more serial. I was also really obsessed with premise-driven genre fiction. As much as I loved Kids in the Hall, I was equally obsessed with people like Richard Matheson or Stephen King or Bradbury or Philip Dick, Shirley Jackson, just anyone who would hook you at the end of the first page and make you keep reading. I was really always thinking of writing through the lens of what is a premise, what is a hook that I can generate that is strong enough to get people to keep turning the pages. John: That’s great. What were the initial things you actually wrote? Were you in a stand-up group? What were the ways you were exploring this idea, like, “Here is the premise. Here is how we hook people in.” Simon: My first book, which was called Ant Farm, it was a collection of short stories that were so short that they basically don’t even have narrative. Each piece is basically a premise, and then it ends before it’s developed in any way. That was pieces I’d written for The New Yorker and other magazines. Basically, it wasn’t really until I got to Pixar – I was a staff writer at Pixar and I worked for Pete Docter writing on Inside Out. It wasn’t until I got there that I really started to think more in terms of narrative and storytelling. I kept being obsessed with premises, but that’s when my writing veered more into a traditional narrative space. John: Great. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, I definitely want to talk about magazine writing and your short stories in magazines, because I really have no idea how that whole world works. Clearly, that was a great entrée for you. But let’s get to Pixar. Was that your first time being a professional staff writer where you were going in to do a job and your job was to write funny stuff? Simon: No, my first job was at Saturday Night Live. John: I’ve heard of Saturday Night Live. It’s a show. For people who don’t know, it’s a very successful comedy program. Simon: My first book had come out. Like I said, it was just a list of premises, and so SNL was a pretty good fit. I never had to really learn any narrative tools, because a lot of the sketches at the time just ended with everybody jumping out of a window. We literally got a warning once – or not a warning, but a very polite request from Seth Meyers, as one of the head writers, just asking us if we could, just for fun, have a week where no sketch ended with every character jumping through a plate glass window while a random ‘80s song played, because that was our go-to sketch out. It was just starting to get on everyone’s nerves. It wasn’t really a story-centric show. That show was all about how do we get people to laugh by any means necessary. I learned so much about comedy and premise writing and dialogue there. I was there for four years. Then it wasn’t until I got to Pixar that I started to actually think about, what is this three-act thing. John: Because this is a show that’s largely listened to by aspiring writers, they want to know how do you get hired into Saturday Night Live. Obviously, at this point you had Ant Farm. People could read that as a sample that, “Oh, this is a guy who understands what a joke is. He understands what a premise is.” But were you also submitting a packet? What was the process of getting hired at Saturday Night Live? Simon: I had no packet. I had Harvard Lampoon. Colin Jost was two years ahead of me. I think he just handed my book to Seth and said basically, “I think you should read this and give this writer consideration.” I wasn’t really thinking about getting into TV and film at the time. I was a magazine writer at that point. I had another book that I was working on. I don’t think I had a television agent at the time. I had a book agent. I fell into it, but I’m really grateful that Colin thought of me for the show. John: what I love about your description of your backstory in your biography is that you keep omitting things that were clearly important steppingstones along the way, like Harvard Lampoon. Harvard Lampoon is of course a great classic training ground for comedy writers. A lot of Saturday Night Live writers, a lot of Simpsons writers came out of Lampoon. Talk to us about – did you go into Harvard thinking, “Oh, this is a place I want to find myself.” Simon: I went in desperate to write for the Harvard Lampoon, desperate to get better at writing. But I did really want to be a short story writer. It’s such a strange ambition. John: Talk to me about that. Who are the short story writers that were inspiring you to say, “This is my calling.” Simon: I would say when I was 18 years old, the writer that I was probably most obsessed with was TC Boyle, whose work has been adapted into a lot of films. Probably the people listening know Road to Wellville is one of them. But TC Boyle is this extremely funny, premise-driven writer. He’s written a lot of historical novels, but his short stories to me were just mind-boggling in terms of how original they were, how funny they were, and how had they incorporated various genres. He was never tethered to a specific genre. He was willing to write a Sherlock Holmes-inspired story and then go straight into a Western. He was a huge idol of mine. I remember going into one of his readings freshman year and just being too afraid to even meet him afterwards. That’s really what I wanted to be. I would send my stories to every magazine on earth. There were a lot more magazines back then. The way that you would submit – it was before online submissions, actually, when I started. You would send a self-addressed stamped envelope along with your story, because the magazines were too cheap to mail you back. You would send your little short story. Under your name at the top, you had to put how many words it was to warn them what they were getting into. I was like, “This is 7,000 words.” I always felt pressured to keep them short, because I knew if that number was too big, they might not even read the first sentence. I would send it off to places like Playboy and Esquire. These were magazines at the time that were publishing really good fiction. The New Yorker. Then I would always put the Lampoon as my return address, because the mail was more reliable coming to our office than to the dorm rooms. Every month, everybody would watch as I would get my stack of rejection letters. Then I eventually started to get nicer rejection letters. I remember I did get a nice rejection letter from Playboy telling me to submit more. It was awesome. A couple others where they had actually written something back, as opposed to just sending you a form letter, which is the typical response, where it’s, “Thank you so much, but we… ” I still have some of those in a drawer somewhere. Some of them were really cool looking. I think the Paris Review had a really cool letterhead. Then I started selling some pieces. The first magazine that I sold to with any kind of consistency was Mad Magazine. John: That’s great. Simon: Then eventually, I started to place pieces in The New Yorker. Ant Farm is a collection of my most successful stories by that age. But again, they weren’t really stories. They were just kind of comedic premises without any elaboration whatsoever. John: Let’s talk about the comedic premise, because one of the things I love about your short stories is I think if someone just handed me a book blind and said, “Read these short stories,” like, “Oh, this is Simon Rich.” I recognize a consistency of voice, despite the genres, despite whatever else. It’s all focusing on characters who are in violation of the social contract or that they have this opportunity to break the social contract, and the repercussions there, and there’s one thing that’s tweaked about the world. It’s a very relatable premise of, it’s a dad who’s taken his family on the train and recognizes it was a big mistake because it’s taking too long. He goes to the bathroom, and he meets the troll there who tries to con him out of… The troll is the addition to the thing that makes it just not a grounded-in-reality story. But let’s talk about, with that story or really any of your stories, what is the comedic premise? Is the comedic premise the thing that’s different or the thing you’re actually going to be able to explore by going into that? The example I gave you is a story about what it’s actually really like to be a parent and just give in and just let your kids do what they want to do. What is the comedic premise for you in those kinds of situations? Is it’s what’s different or what you can get out of it? Simon: I would say that there are comedic premises that are really, really funny but are not necessarily emotionally – they don’t have what I would call narrative legs necessarily. For example, when I was at SNL, I wrote a lot of sketches with John Mulaney and Marika Sawyer. John Mulaney actually reads the audio book for Glory Days. I’m supposed to plug the hard cover, because it’s more expensive, but everyone should obviously listen to this one instead. But we wrote a sketch called Rocket Dog. The premise is that Tracy Morgan is a film director and he has directed an Air Bud style film called Rocket Dog, the inspirational story of a boy and his dog and a rocket that they fly. It becomes clear, after watching the clip based on the in-memoriam sequence that runs at the end, that many dogs died, and also some people, during the making of Rocket Dog. That’s what I would call a comedic premise, but I don’t know if that necessarily is a premise that has narrative legs. It’s a premise that can support hopefully a three-minute-and-a-half sketch. John: Let’s talk about that, because essentially what you’re describing, that is the punchline. The premise is the punchline where you’re getting to, and you have to establish the context around it. Talk about that specific sketch. What was the initial pitch on it? What was the process of going from, “What about this sort of space?” to, “There’s now something written down. There’s something that we’re going to get approved. There’s something that we’re actually going to rehearsal.” Can you walk us through what that’s like? Simon: The pitch is the hook. The pitch is you reveal in an in memoriam that – you show a bunch of dogs. That’s the pitch. It’s like, okay, great, that’s a strong turn, a strong comedic reveal. How do we sustain it? The answer, of course, sketch comedy rules, as we had to figure out new ways to escalate it and show multiple in memoriam sequences and make sure that we’re escalating the carnage at every turn. Also, we have to write a lot of jokes and have reaction shots from Kristen. You just kind of go through the mechanics of sketch writing. A big important execution thing for that is what music do we play for the in-memoriam sequence. Marika Sawyer, one of the funniest people ever, wisely pointed out that it had to be a pretty uplifting, jaunty song. Otherwise, it would just be too sad to watch all of these dead dogs float by. She selected Life Is A Highway, which is just perfect. Still to this day, it’s one of my daughter’s favorite songs, actually. To this day, when it comes on our Alexa, I just think of hundreds of murdered animals. John: That’s great. But I want to get a little more granular in terms of, okay, you have this idea. How is it written up and how is it presented to the group? How does it get approved to be in the episode of the week? Simon: Oh, like in the process at SNL. At SNL, the writers are really allowed to write whatever they want, for better or for worse. That’s probably an idea that we had on Monday. Then on Tuesday night is when we would’ve actually written it into script form. That’s just the three of us in a room pitching jokes. Typically, we would write a long outline first. That was every single joke option in order. We had a rough shape of a sketch, but there’s many, many alts. But they’re arranged loose, chronologically. All the entrance jokes are at the top. All the premise-establishing jokes are at the top. John: When you say writing, is this just in Word or something? What are you doing this in? Simon: I always like to write the first outline in Word. It would always be a long Word document. Then we wouldn’t switch into script form until we basically were sick of writing jokes for it. Then it’s about just picking your lanes and reading it out loud many, many times. We were lucky that one of us could act. That was actually really important for Mulaney to basically read all the main parts, so we could actually hear whether or not it was good, because Marika and I are not performers. If we didn’t have somebody with comedic timing, we would have to just hear it in our heads, which is not as successful a way to vent comedy. It’s better to hear somebody who’s actually funny read it. John: Over this course of – this is Tuesday night you’re writing or Wednesday night you’re writing? Simon: This is Tuesday night into Wednesday morning, 2:00, 3:00, 4:00 a.m. Then you turned it in. Then Wednesday there’s this big table read where you hear cast doing it and the host doing it for the first time. Now it’s down to 40 sketches, I think, or even less. But when I was there, they would read sometimes up to 50 sketches. John: Wow. Simon: They would pick a dozen, and those would be fully produced, and then they would cut four during dress rehearsal on Saturday night. John: In this Wednesday table read, so you already said Tracy Morgan will play the director. You’re already making those choices. Tracy doesn’t have time to prep it. He’s just reading it cold, right? Simon: Right. John: Great. Then hopefully, the sketch gets selected. You figure out how to produce it. Then you do it in the dress rehearsal. Then you see if you’re actually going to do it like for the big show. Rinse and repeat hundreds of times. Simon: Yeah, exactly. You had everyone’s help for the rest of the week. Once the sketches are picked, you have a whole day on Thursday where you have essentially a room that is a very traditional LA style writers’ room. We had one day a week where it felt like working for a sitcom, where you come in at a normal hour, and everyone argues about what to order for lunch. You’re spending a day collectively looking at scripts, figuring out as a group how to improve it, how to pitch alts, how to make scenes more efficient. There was one day a week that felt like traditional sitcom writing feels like. John: You have dozens of sketches you have to do, so you can’t spend the whole day working on Rocket Dog. Simon: No, but they would split into two tables. There’d be five or six sketches maybe per room. Every eight-page script got at least an hour of attention. It always felt supported by the writers’ room. John: Then at the end of the writers’ room day, the three of you would go back with the Rocket Dog sketch and get it into its final shooting shape? There’s obviously the rehearsal before there’s the dress, and then there’s the final show. How much would change between the rehearsal, between the dress and the final? Simon: A lot is changing after the rewrite table, although not that much typically. I would say maybe it’s 10 or 20 percent different after a Thursday. It has to be pretty close to the goal line for them to pick it. It’s probably a new ending, definitely some improved jokes, but it’s essentially the same thing. The casting remains the same. The structure usually remains the same. Friday and Saturday you’re really mainly focused on production, like what are they wearing and approving props. At SNL, you’re approving everything, because the writers produce their own sketches at SNL. John: Now, how many years were you working on Saturday Night Live? Simon: Four seasons. John: Four seasons. You went from there to go to Pixar? Simon: Yeah, I went straight from SNL to Pixar. It was maybe a few days in between the end of the season and my first day. It was such a culture shock, because I’d literally been coming from an environment where we would spend six days making a 90-minute piece of entertainment. At Pixar, it would be 10 years to make the same number of minutes. I mainly worked on Inside Out. Just to put it into perspective, I think I was maybe the second or third writer on that. It had already been a year maybe of development before I showed up. After I was gone, it was I think five more years before it came out. It’s just absolutely glacial, especially compared to late-night television. John: I’ve been to Pixar and on their campus. It’s such a strange place. Lovely, but super calm. They’re riding their bikes all around. I heard them say things like, “Let’s do a three-day offsite about this scene.” I’m like, “Oh my god.” That just terrifies me. They’re drilling down and being so granular on certain things. I don’t think I could survive it. But tell me about what you were doing on a daily basis. What words were you putting out? Simon: That job, I guess I would describe it – it was a lot, I think, like being a staff writer for an animated sitcom is what I would compare it to. With the director, in this case Pete Docter, being the creator showrunner. It’s Pete’s movie. It’s Pete’s idea. It’s Pete’s vision. He’s the showrunner. Then as a staff writer, you’re working with him but also with storyboard artists and co-directors to help Pete break the story. Then I would be assigned scenes to write. It’s pretty similar to what I imagine it would be like to write for an animated sitcom. John: At any given point, was there a fully completed script, or were you just doing pieces and little chunks? Could you ever print out a script and say this is the script for the movie at this state? Simon: No, because it’s so iterative. Every single sequence is at a different stage. Some things are in animatics. Some things are just in boards. It’s a very complex process. Part of it is just because it’s really hard to animate a movie. John: What you’re describing, people should know, is very traditional for how animated movies are done. Disney does it this way. Pixar does it this way. Most places are doing it this way. Then weirdly, I’ve had the opposite experience, where I write a script and turn it in, and they make that script. For the stop-motion animation I’ve done for Tim Burton, there’s a script. Yes, there are storyboard artists and other things, but they’re figuring out how to execute the script, rather than this being this back and forth. It’s a very different experience for writers who are doing what you’re doing, which is having to constantly react to what other people around them are doing. It’s not theater, but it’s just like you’re almost documenting what the current state of the story is. Simon: Totally. John: I want to drill in a little bit more here, because you said this is the first one that you’ve learned about character in three acts and moving beyond that initial premise, because a sketch or your shorter short stories are literally just the premise, and it’s just the punchline. Here, you have to keep moving on beyond that. What stuff did you learn at Pixar? Simon: I think the clearest explanation of what I learned is you get to see how much I ripped them off. I wrote a story when I was there called Unprotected, which is the story of a very conventional premise. It’s a teenage boy, and he is struggling to figure out a way to lose his virginity, so essentially the premise of a million summer movies for many decades. What made it unique is that it was told entirely from the point of view of the condom in the boy’s wallet, who is waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting to be used. It is just Toy Story. It is just a straight one-to-one version of Toy Story, an R-rated Toy Story, where it’s a coming-of-age story about a young person told from the perspective of this anthropomorphic object. It was so blatant. I remember coming to campus when The New Yorker ran it. I remember walking past the lamp, the little lamp statue, and a storyboard artist pointed to me and was like, “Toy Story, right?” I was like, “Yep.” I didn’t get in trouble or anything. But that was just me really trying to see if I could take the story moves of literally a famous Pixar movie and just ape them for my own creative purposes. That’s something I’d keep doing. But I’m not shy about it, because Pixar would do the same thing. We would constantly map out the story for hugely popular movies and just say, “Okay, how can we turn our project into this? What would happen if we copied it exactly?” Invariably, you’d find, we can copy these aspects exactly, but not these, because we have a slightly different agenda. That process of modeling and emulation is another really important thing that I learned from them, in addition to just literally copying them. John: One of the things I think you can get away with so well in short stories – you can also do it in SNL sketches – is be able to take a piece of existing IP and completely just subvert it or ask the question you could never ask in the initial IP. The title story in Glory Days is Mario’s journey into middle age and what he’s wrestling with. Can you talk to us about that premise and what you were trying to explore and what was the initial instinct? Was it the wholly formed idea, or was it just like, “Oh, wouldn’t it be funny to do a story about what Mario’s life is actually like?” Simon: The initial instinct was I read an article on my phone, I’m sure, that was like, “Super Mario debuted in 1984, 40 years ago,” or whatever. I said, “Oh, Mario’s turning 40. That’s hilarious. What is his midlife crisis like?” I was really excited to dive in, especially because I knew I’d be able to get to write the entire thing in Mario’s singular voice. John: “It’sa me.” Simon: Yeah, which is this incredibly offensive two-dimensional stereotype Italian accent. I was really excited to be able to take a voice like that, which is so dumb and so lazy, and just imbue it hopefully with some humanity and some pathos. You find out that he lost all his coins. He got so many. They had whole rooms of coins that he just pocketed. But he made a rookie mistake in the business, which is he trusted a friend to manage his money. Yoshi just took him for all he was worth. He’s estranged from the princess. John: Who he still needs to rescue. Simon: Who he needs to rescue for the millionth time. He says he’s starting to suspect that she’s getting kidnapped by Koopas on purpose, which of course is really offensive. But that is what he believes. John: His relationship with Luigi is strained, and because of Luigi’s partner, and there’s lots of very specific things. Simon: Luigi got sober, which is great, because he was gonna die. But he’s married to this extremely boring guy, Kalami, who is really nice and super loaded and has this fancy job, but is just constantly getting on Mario’s case, like, “You need to get a job.” He actually makes Mario fill out a resume, which is this very tragic scene, because Mario is like, “I have experienced saving princesses.” Kalami’s like, “You need to put down your plumbing experience, because that’s where the jobs are at in this market.” Mario is just kind of devastated. It ends up being a story of different types of winning. Mario is a character who has a very specific idea of what it is to win. You get a lot of points. You climb that castle thing and you jump and grab that flag thing. Then you stand next to the princess while Japanese text scrolls slowly by your face. That’s what winning means. In midlife, through the story that he lives through, he kind of comes up with different priorities and a different understanding of what victory can look like. John: You said that the premise was Mario’s turned 40, what’s Mario’s midlife crisis like. How much did you figure out about everything else you just described before you sat down to start writing, or was it just the process of writing that you explored all the other things? Simon: Great question. Basically, what I do is – the first thing, still to this day, and this is what I’ve been doing since I started writing as a kid – until I have the premise, I basically don’t do any story or comedy work whatsoever. It’s just finding the premise. Once I got the premise, then I do a lot of what I guess you would call exploratory writing or free writing, where I’m like, “Okay, I really like this hook. I think it has a motion and legs. It makes me laugh.” Then I just write a bunch of just random scenes. If it’s close third person, there’ll be third-person scenes. If it’s first person, there’ll be first-person paragraphs, just to test it, to make sure that it’s fun, that I’m gonna have a fun time doing it. Then I take a big step back and I outline it. That process is, I would imagine, very similar to the one that most screenwriters go through. I take a big step back and I say, “Okay, what is the act one, act two, act three.” I don’t do that unless I’m really in love with the premise and in love with the point of view. John: You say you don’t want to start until you really know the premise. By the premise, you mean the hook, and do you think what the engine is that will get you through the story? Simon: No, I don’t necessarily have the engine. I think I just have the premise and the point of view. Is it going to be first person, is it going to be close third. John: Let’s also define close third person, because it’s a term that people may not be familiar with. Third person is obviously we’re looking at the character doing stuff, so “he did,” “she did,” that kind of stuff. But close third person is like the camera’s almost right behind the person’s back and we’re only seeing the stuff and knowing the stuff that they would know. Simon: Exactly. Screenplays, they are pretty much written in what fiction writers would call the omniscient third, where it’s like, this is what is happening. This is literally what you are looking at. There are exceptions, like if you’re Shane Black or whatever, where the stage directions have a personality maybe or they’re written in the first person by the screenwriter. John: They’re also written in the first-person plural. That’s why the “we hears,” “we sees,” the feeling like we are here together watching this movie, but we don’t have insight into just one character. We can have a global view. Simon: You never write a stage direction like, “As she crosses the crosswalk, she sees a bird out of the corner of her eye and recalls a childhood song.” That would be very hard for the viewer to notice in a wide shot. John: If you establish the premise and the point of view before you go into it, then you’re free writing to find what are the things that are interesting there, find what do you think the little bits and moments might be. Simon: It’s like test driving a car or something. I just want to know that it’s going to be fun, because writing a story is really hard. I want to make sure it’s going to be a good time. It’s like, is it gonna be fun to write in this voice for a few weeks? John: How much time are you spending on that free writing period? Simon: Not too long. I would say a couple of days and then I’ll say, “Yeah, this is gonna be fine.” Then I have to do the challenging thing, which is break the story. John: Then breaking the story, this is your outline phase, which is basically what are the beats. For a story like Glory Days, how long is your outline? How detailed is that outline in terms of these are the actual scenes that are gonna happen? Simon: I don’t go as spartan as cards on a board, like, I would in a TV room, but I’m pretty close. I would say a sentence or two sentences max per scene. I just try to figure out what is – I guess I can give away that story. It doesn’t really matter. The situation, the call to action is the princess gets kidnapped by a Koopa. But the issue is that he has horrific back problems. Mario has spent the entirety of his adult life just running and jumping at full speed, at full intensity. John: Absolutely. Simon: Smashing many bricks. John: With his head. Simon: With his head or his fists. It’s unclear how he’s doing it. But either way, it’s very arduous and rugged. His doctor, Dr. Mario, no relation, tells him that he needs intense spinal surgery, or else he might lose the ability to walk. He says, “You’re gonna lose the ability to walk.” He also speaks in Mario voice, of course. Mario can’t make it through eight worlds, plus mini worlds, all the way to Koopa’s castle, unless he fixes his back. If he has the surgery, he’s incapacitated for a year. He finds this back brace, this revolutionary back brace that he can wear, but it’s really expensive. He needs money to get the back brace so he can rescue the princess. That is the act one goal is he’s gotta do it. The low point at the end of act two is, by this point he has robbed his brother, because Luigi and his husband refuse to – they basically say, “We’re not going to enable your toxic relationship with the princess anymore. We’re not gonna lend you any more money.” Mario, in a really emotional low point, he steals Luigi’s Amazon packages and sells them online so he can get enough money for this back brace. Then he sends it over to the guy, and the guy starts asking him for garlic over the phone. That’s when he realizes that it was actually Wario. John: The whole time. Simon: It was a scam. He was tricked. Now he has nothing. He has no back brace. He has no money. He’s robbed his brother. That’s the act two low point. The princess is sending him texts like, “Where the hell are you?” He’s got no way to save her and no way to save himself. Then act three is redemption. The way I actually outline the stories is no different than the way I would outline an episode of Man Seeking Woman or a film. John: Talk me through that process. In this outline, you’re really establishing what are the story points, how much story do I need to tell this whole story, because what you’re describing is great for a short story. It’s not gonna be enough for a movie, but there’s plenty there for what this is supposed to be. I think one of the great things about a short story is that you don’t have to have anyone’s permission to make this parody of Mario, whereas a movie or anything else, you couldn’t do it. Simon: There’s a lot of freedom that you have in fiction that you don’t have as a screenwriter. Fictional characters never show up late and hungover. You don’t have any budget conversations. You don’t have any studio notes. The amount of control and freedom that authors have over their books is amazing compared to the amount of control most screenwriters have. I’m not a hugely famous writer, author, but I wield as much power over my books as Vin Diesel does over the Fast and the Furious franchise. John: Absolutely. Simon: I could say to my editor, “I want to intentionally misspell this word.” My editor will be like, “I don’t think that’s a smart idea, but okay, Mr. Diesel.” It’s on that level. It’s such a different level of freedom than I have when I’m working in TV and film. John: Absolutely. I’ve done three books. I did the Arlo Finch series. It was great and liberating to actually have final say over every last little detail. Every piece of world building that I wanted to do or not do was there because I wanted it specifically there. At the same time, you don’t have the benefits of everybody else there to make a big final thing. As we wrap up the premise, I want to talk about your experience actually making things with other people and having to do longer-form things, your two series or American Pickle. These are situations where you had this comedic premise that was originally a short story and you had to build it out into – let’s take Man Seeking Woman into a series. What is that conversation, and what needs to change in order to make that a sustainable thing with other people involved? Simon: I love collaborative writing for a number of reasons. The biggest reason is just that – and I’ve talked about this already – you learn so much, or at least I’ve learned so much, from working with other writers. I learned so much at SNL from writing with Mulaney, writing with Marika, writing with Seth Meyers and for Seth. Seth was my boss. He was an amazing teacher and mentor. I learned a lot from trying to emulate him but also just literally asking him questions, like, “How do I do this? Why did you make that choice?” Same thing at Pixar. I feel like I learned a ton working for Pete on Inside Out. But I would also just ask him and everybody else, “Hey, when you were doing Toy Story 3, why did you make this decision? How did you come up with this story point? What was your process?” You learn, or at least I’ve learned a ton from the collaborative work that I’ve done. You have access to not just the brilliant minds of other writers, but like you said, all these other brilliant artists who are contributing in such meaningful ways. I would say the thing that I miss the most when I’m writing fiction is the music, because it’s such an unbelievably powerful, visceral, emotional tool. My younger kid has this Cocomelon book where you press a button and it sings the ABCs, and you press another button and it sings, “The wheels on the bus go round and round.” I always fantasize that I could have a button in my short story collections when it gets to the emotional denouement of a story. Mario is in the hospital bed holding Luigi’s hand. If you could press a button and John Williams plays, that would be dope. I really miss that tool. But the thing that it gets you is freedom but also control. I think that a show like Man Seeking Woman, I’m really proud of the show. I loved running that show. But I would have to be a megalomaniacal psychopath to say that that show is mine the way my books are mine. I didn’t write all the episodes. I certainly didn’t act in any of them. I did not make the monsters. I definitely didn’t compose or sing the song at the end, in the third act of Episode 307, which is the only reason why the emotional arc landed. There’s so many aspects of it that I cannot take credit for, whereas the books, for better or for worse, they are completely mine. They’re more communicative. I don’t know if they’re necessarily better, but they’re more personal. John: Yeah, for sure. We have two listener questions that I think might be especially appropriate for you. Drew, can you help us out with these listener questions? Drew: James in Washington writes, “Given the current state of the industry, should struggling screenwriters think about writing novels if they have good stories that can’t find a pathway to the screen?” John: What’s your take on that, Simon? Simon: It’s a great question. I think everybody should try it, just like I think everybody should try stand-up comedy. Stand-up comedy, there’s nothing more pure than that. You can just stand on a stage. People don’t even need to know how to read. They can be illiterate. You can just tell them anything. The only reason not to do it really is because you are bad at it or don’t like it, which you can’t really learn until you try it. I tried stand-up in high school and learned very quickly that I was bad at it and also that I hated it. But if you’re okay at it and you like it, then you might be willing to put in the thousands of hours it takes to become great at it. I think it’s the same thing with fiction. Give it a shot. If you’ve never written fiction before, it would be unusual for you to start off being great at it. But you might enjoy it and you might feel like it’s worth pursuing. If you really like it, then you might be able to put in enough time to become great at it. Then you’ll have this whole other avenue through which to express yourself, where you don’t need to ask for permission. You don’t need to get funded. You don’t need to pitch. You can just write it, and then it’s in the world and it’s finished. John: Absolutely. I think implicit in James’s question is, “It’s tough to make a living as a screenwriter now, so should I be writing novels because it’s easier to make a living as a novelist?” It’s not. It’s really tough to be a person who writes books. It’s tough to be a writer who is making a living in general. Your ability to have complete control over everything and to not have to get anyone’s permission to do a thing is great. You don’t need permission to write a screenplay either. But if fiction appeals to you, try it. One thing I’d also recommend is listen to what Simon’s saying about the premise. Some premises work really well for fiction or they work really well for a short story, they work really well for a play, but they’re not gonna necessarily work well for a movie. If you have an idea that is really interesting to you but it doesn’t feel like a movie idea or a series idea, then give yourself permission to explore it as what it wants to be. Simon: Totally. John: Let’s try a second question here. Drew: Macklin writes, “I’ve recently found a love for playwriting again. Is there an unknown downside to publishing work in other areas, like novels or plays, or establishing an online newsletter or something?” Simon: A downside? Not that I can think of. It’s a blast. Writing fiction is so fun. There are a lot of screenwriters out there that I think would be really good at writing fiction and might enjoy it. Playwriting is not something I’ve done a lot of, so I can’t speak to that. But it’s really thrilling to be able to just wake up in the morning and go right into it and not have to ask for permission. John: I would agree with you. I’m curious about how do you budget your time in terms of thinking, “Oh, I should do a short story now,” or is short story writing what you do when you don’t have other Hollywood stuff that you need to do? What’s the Simon Rich calculus for writing short stories? Simon: As strange as it is to admit it, I am a short story writer. That is how I identify. That is what I’ve been doing since college. Everything else is, I don’t want to say intrusion, because that makes me sound ungrateful for the Hollywood work. But Glory Days is my 10th book. I have done other things. I did write a couple of novels. I’ve run television shows. But even the shows that I ran were based on my books. Most of the movies I’ve written or scripts I’ve written have been based on my short stories. I know it’s a weird thing to have devoted one’s life to, and I’m not going to try to defend it. But I am like a short story writer who sometimes adapts his work into other mediums, basically. John: What you’re doing though, it’s analogous to some people who’ve spent their entire life writing on SNL though, because you’re writing very short, focused things that are in a very specific form, and that’s what feels really natural for you to write. Focusing on that and finding a thing that you write that you love sounds great. I do wonder if sometimes on the podcast, because we’re mostly talking about feature writing or TV writing, we steer people into belief that that’s a thing that people should be aiming to do. There’s lots of other great ways to write that are not those things. It was important for us to have you on just to talk about people who have that instinct, who are funny, who have that instinct like, “This is a funny idea.” Just because it’s a funny idea doesn’t necessarily mean that a feature or a TV series is the only way to express it. Simon: Totally. Totally. I think the voice thing, that’s a big one. You might find that you really love to write in the first person and from an unusual point of view. That’s what I miss the most when I’m writing scripts. I would say when I was running Man Seeking Woman, those three years were the one time in my writing career where I really was focused on television more than fiction. I really felt at that job like I had as much freedom as one could ask for. The reason why is because it was at the absolute peak of an insane bubble. Also, our show is unbelievably cheap. A lot of forces had to conspire for us to be allowed to continue to make that show that nobody saw. The Canadian dollar was at a historic low. We were shooting in Toronto. If you look at a 150-year graph of the Canadian dollar, there’s this unaccountable three-year dip that perfectly coincides with the history of Man Seeking Woman. I don’t know what happened. There’s a maple syrup shortage or something. But anyway, working on that show, I had a lot of freedom. I could write and approve my favorite premises. I have Bill Hader playing Hitler in a pilot, and nobody blinked. But I still missed writing in the first person. I missed being able to tell an entire story from the perspective of a horse or a baby or a talking condom. Even though I could have characters like that on a show and I could write dialogue from unusual points of view and- John: But you didn’t have insight into the inner thinking of that character. The way that fiction writing is like whispering in somebody’s ear is just a very special connection. Simon: It’s very specific. Even in the best of times, which I would say Man Seeking Woman was for me, I found myself missing my incredibly stupid narrator voice. John: Great. It is time for our One Cool Things, where we recommend stuff to our audience. My One Cool Thing this week is Howtown. It’s a series on YouTube by Joss Fong and Adam Cole. They try to answer one question in every episode, so things like how do we know what dogs can see, how do we really know COVID’s real death toll. It’s just incredibly well produced, smartly researched. But also it just looks really good. It’s smartly written. Check out the series Howtown. There’s a bunch of episodes that are up now, and they’re gonna keep doing more of them. But check it out. YouTube, Joss Fong and Adam Cole. Simon, do you have a One Cool Thing for us? Simon: I do. I’m on vacation for a couple weeks in Wisconsin, seeing some family. I found a book on the shelf of the Airbnb that I’m at, which I am obsessed with. I’m also finished with it. Hopefully the last 50 or 100 pages aren’t terrible. But I’m gonna recommend it anyway. It’s called Dr. Eckener’s Dream Machine, the historic saga of the round-the-world zeppelin, by Douglas Botting. It is just a phenomenal, true, nonfiction account ofana actual 11-day round-the-world zeppelin voyage that took place in 1929. John: Wow. Simon: Basically, when you think of zeppelins, you think of the Hindenburg, which is the correct thing to think of, because that wasn’t a one-off accident. These things exploded all the time, catastrophically. The way that they worked is there was a big bag of hydrogen, and then basically a fire would run an engine that was right next to the bag. If any sparks cut from the fire to the bag, everyone would die every single time. But it worked one time. This is about that one time. The descriptions of them circumnavigating the globe are stunning, because they’re not very high off the ground. They’re only at times about 300 or 500 feet off the ground. John: Oh, wow. Simon: They go over continents that have never seen or heard of air travel. They describe in Siberia people essentially, for the 20 hours that they’re going over Siberia, everyone is terrified and thinks that they are an actual alien or a monster. John: That’s amazing. As you bring up zeppelins, or this specific story, there are so many premises that can pop out of this. What you’re describing in terms of zeppelins just basically want to explode, telling it from the zeppelin’s point of view, telling it from the insurance company that has to insure zeppelins. There are endless possibilities there. Or the actual story of this journey could be something fascinating too. It’s a great One Cool Thing. Simon: Thank you. John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nico Mansy. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to [email protected]. That’s also the place where you can send questions, like the ones we answered today. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies and hats. You can find those at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record with Simon about about getting your short stories published in magazines. Simon Rich, an absolute pleasure talking with you finally after all these years. Simon: Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. Big fan of the show and fan of yours as well. [Bonus Segment] John: Simon, you publish these stories, before they’re in your books, in many, many magazines around the world. New Yorker obviously is the one I think about the most, but McSweeney’s, GQ, Vanity Fair. I have other friends who have don’t his as well. Megan Amram does this. BJ Novak does this. Can you talk me through what the actual process is for you right now? Your short stories are gonna be great. Do you just say, “I got a new one,” and they just say, “Great. Here’s a couple pages.” What is the process for letting them know that you have a short story that you want published? Simon: Good question. It’s a smoother process now than it was when I started 20 years ago. Should I walk through the genesis of it? John: It’s different if you’re Stephen King. Talk us through the process. Simon: In the early days, I had no agent, and I would just send envelopes with my stories – that’s dating myself – to various magazines, with a self-addressed stamped envelope, saying, “Would you please read it?” They would either not write back at all, or they would send back a form, rejection letter, a rejection slip, I should say. A lot of times they were just actually horizontal strips of paper. John: They didn’t want to waste a full sheet of paper. Simon: Exactly. There’s no need to. The next step was I started to get some positive feedback from some editors at magazines saying, “We like this,” or, “We read this,” or, “We think this is really funny, but it’s not for us. Please submit again.” Then all of a sudden, you have a contact. You have an editor. Then you have their email address or even phone number. Then it becomes a little bit easier, because you can ask them, “What sort of things are you looking for?” Then they might write back, “We’re doing a travel issue in six months. You have any travel pieces?” or whatever. The bullseye appears more cleanly through the fog as you start to know editors. Then once you have an agent, then it becomes much, much easier, because they of course have a lot more contacts probably than you do typically as a writer. John: Now, at this point, you tell your agent, “Here’s the short story that I have.” Then are you discussing where is the right place for it to go, are there preexisting contracts or negotiations? Would any of your stories be appropriate for any of these places? What are you thinking as you do that? Simon: I learned from a really early age that when I feel pressure to sell things, it doesn’t necessarily make my writing worse, but it makes it less interesting. I only really felt that pressure once, which tells you how privileged my career has been. But it was during the writers strike in 2007, ’08. Was that- John: 2008, yeah. Simon: Yeah, around then, yeah. I had started writing for SNL, but I was four weeks in. I still hadn’t earned the minimum for health insurance. I was doing just fine. I had a book deal. But I did feel some pressure to make some money. I started pitching aggressively to every single magazine under the sun and wrote a lot of pieces that I think are just not in my voice. It was more just like, “Okay, this is what’s in the news,” or, “This Maxim Magazine knockoff seems to be doing a lot of this sort of piece.” I started to write a lot of things just chasing freelance money. Now, because I have the luxury of thinking of things in a less mercenary way, I just write the entire book, basically. I don’t show anything to anybody really. Then I just send the entire manuscript to my agent, who sends it to The New Yorker, and they pick the ones that they want to run. That way, I’m not thinking about, “Oh, they probably want a Trump piece,” or whatever. John: Totally. Thinking about it this way, so you’ve written all the short stories that are gonna be a part of a book. I notice in Glory Days, you have it broken into one, two, and three. There’s some sectioning to it, and yet each of the stories does stand on its own. I’m hard-pressed to find a connecting thread between them. But they all feel like this is one book that is together. You’ve written this book. You’re sending it to your editor. It’s going to The New Yorker. What is the purpose of getting those published in The New Yorker? Is it from them paying you directly, or it’s exposure for the book that you’re trying to do? Simon: My goal as a writer always is for people to read the stories or listen to them or experience them in some way. That is the absolute only goal that I have. I hope that people will give these stories a chance, read them, listen to them, relate to it, connect to it in some emotional way, and I’ll feel less alone in the universe. That’s why I make this stuff. One hopes that they have enough cash that they could spend their days living that artistic life. John: With these short stories in this most recent collection, The New Yorker might say, “Oh, we want this short story.” Would they ever come back to you with a note on the short story, or is it gonna be published as it is, because you also have your book editor who’s going through and reading the stories too. Do you get stuff from both sides? Simon: I don’t really get big edits anymore. But I do get a lot of suggestions and feedback about what you would call line edits, which are really useful and really helpful. I also get fact checked, which you wouldn’t expect for a fiction writer. But it’s incredibly useful. The fact checkers at The New Yorker are the best in the world. They’re basically the equivalent of what we would call script supervisors. They’re finding inconsistencies. They’re saying, “Why are they eating lunch if it’s night out?” and, “I thought you said she was a cardiologist, but then when we see her patient, he’s complaining about a broken leg.” That’s a huge help to me. They’ll say, “Stop using that adverb. You’ve used it three times in 4,000 words.” I get a lot of editorial guidance and help when it comes to the actual execution of the sentences that I’m super grateful for. But I don’t get the notes that I get all the time in TV and film of like, “Can you make the protagonist more likable?” John: Totally. Where are you at in your process? This book is coming out July 23rd. Everyone should buy it. Is the next book already done? Are you short story by short story? Where are you at in your work? Simon: I used to do that. I used to basically, when I would finish a book, I would literally turn in a book and then the next day would start the next one. Now, I try really hard not to do that, because I find that especially my early books, I started to repeat myself, because I hadn’t allowed myself to live life in between the books. I would just be writing the same book again, but slightly worse. I don’t want to single books out. But I think the first half of my career, there are definitely a few where I’m like, I should’ve maybe waited a year before diving back into it. What I’m doing now is the same thing I’ve done after the last few books. I just try to generate premises from reading. I read a lot about subjects that I’m interested in. I let myself just jot down premises that I think might be worth exploring. I’m not gonna pursue any of them for probably another six months or so. John: You’re not a person who beats yourself up if you’re not sitting down generating 1,000 words per day. Simon: No. I work a set number of hours a day, I would say. But sometimes my work is just sitting down for six hours and reading a book about zeppelins, because it’s been proven to me that that’s useful. There was a yearlong period where I was just obsessed with pirates. I would just read endlessly about pirates, and to no end, really. Then one day I just got the idea for a story about two pirates, Captain Blackbones the Wicked, and Rotten Pete the Scoundrel. They find a stowaway on their pirate ship, and they have to decide whether or not to throw the stowaway overboard to the sharks or to feed her and take care of her. I was like, “Oh, this is a parenting story.” I ended up writing the story Learning the Ropes in my last book, New Teeth. I wrote that story a full year into my pirate obsession. There are a number of topics like that, where I’m like, someday I’m sure I will figure out. I will crack it. But you can’t really force it. John: Simon, an absolute pleasure. Simon: Thanks. Thanks for having me. John: Thanks. Links: Glory Days by Simon Rich “Gifted” by Simon Rich Rocket Dog sketch Howtown with Joss Fong and Adam Cole Dr. Eckener’s Dream Machine: The Great Zeppelin and the Dawn of Air Travel by Douglas Botting Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt! Check out the Inneresting Newsletter Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription! Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter John on Mastodon Outro by Nico Mansy (send us yours!) Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Jonathan Wigdortz. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Email us at [email protected] You can download the episode here.The post Scriptnotes, Episode 649: The Comedic Premise with Simon Rich, Transcript first appeared on John August.

The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August and you’re listening to Episode 647 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today I am so lucky to have two Scriptnotes producers in the studio with me. Megana Rao, welcome back. Megana Rao: Thank you. I’m excited to be here. John: Drew, of course, you’re always here. Drew Marquardt: You’re stuck with me. John: We are doing a compendium episode, a best of things. Drew, as you were putting this together, you realized that this is familiar territory here. Drew: It’s an endings compendium. Going through, I found out that Megana had already made an endings compendium in Episode 524, which was very good, but I’m gonna try and one-up you. Megana: I so welcome that. Yes and me, please. Drew: That’s the best way to do it. John: Talk to me about the things you chose for this, which Megana may have already chosen for her episode too. Drew: We’re starting out with a clip from Episode 44, which is breaking down how an ending works. It’s a really great primer for what you should be looking for in endings. Then we’re gonna go to Episode 170 and talk about twist endings. There was a great article that provided a framework for that. Then we’re gonna go to Episode 366 to talk about denouements, that little moment after you’re climax where you’re wanting to wrap everything up. Then we’re gonna go to Episode 392, talking about how that last moment or last image develops and how to fix an ending that’s not working. John: The reason why this is relevant for me this week is I was just doing the Sundance Labs. One of the things you do in Sundance Labs traditionally is show a scene from your movies or movies you enjoy. The theme for this lab session was endings. Susannah Grant was talking about the ending of Erin Brockovich. It’s not just about winning the case. It’s all the things that happen after that and how you tie up all those relationships and things that actually matter to your audience. Endings were on my mind. It’s great to have both of you here for this. We’ll start with this Episode 44 clip and then hear bloops between them. But the three of us will be back here at the end for our One Cool Things, little wrap-up, and then we’ll do our Bonus Segment. We’re gonna talk about reunions, which is something that happens after an ending. Drew: Yeah, like right now. John: Yeah. [Episode 44 Clip] John: I thought today we’d start by talking about endings, and let this be more of a craft episode, because a lot times as we start looking at writing screenplays and start writing TV pilots, it’s all about those first 10 pages, about getting people hooked and getting people to know your world, getting people to love your characters. That’s not ultimately what they’re gonna walk away from your movie with. They’re gonna walk away from your movie with an ending. And so I thought we would spend some time today talking about endings, and the characteristics of good endings, and the things you need to look for as a writer as you’re figuring out what your story is, both way in advance and as you’re leading up to those last few pages. Craig: I think we had talked in a prior podcast about the bare minimums required to start beyond idea, main character. And for me, one of them is ending. I need to know how the movie ends, because essentially, the process of the story is one that takes you from your key crucial first 5 pages to those key crucial last 10. Everything in between is informed by your beginning and your ending. Everything. I’ve never understood people who write and have no idea how the movie’s gonna end. That’s insane to me. John: I would argue that a screenplay is essentially a contract between a writer and a reader, and same with a book, but we’re talking about screenplays. And you are saying to the reader, “If you will give me your time and your attention, I will show you a world, I will tell you story, and it will get to a place that you will find satisfying. And it will surprise you. It will fulfill you. You will have enjoyed spending your time reading this script and seeing the potential in this movie.” The ending is where you want to be lost. It’s the punch line. It’s the resolution. It’s the triumph. And so often, it’s the last thing we actually really focus on. So many writers, I think, spend all of their time working on those first 10 pages, their first 30 pages, then sort of powering through the script. And those last 5, 10 pages are written in a panicked frenzy because they owe the script to somebody or they just have to finish. And so those last 10 pages are just banged out and they’re not executed with nearly the precision and nearly the detail of how the movie started, which is a shame because if you think about any movie that you see in the theater, hopefully you’re enjoying how it starts, hopefully you’re enjoying how the ride goes along, but your real impression of the movie was how it ended. My impression of Silence of the Lambs, great movie all the way through, but I’m thinking about Jodie Foster in the basement and sort of what happens there. As I look at more recent movies like Prometheus, I’m looking at the things I enjoyed along the way, but I’m also asking, “Did I enjoy where that movie took me to at the end?” Craig: Yeah. I like what you say about contract. That’s exactly right, because it’s understood that everything that you see is raveling or unraveling, depending on your perspective, towards this conclusion. The conclusion must be intentional. We always took about intention and specificity. The conclusion must, when you get to it, be satisfying in a way that makes you realize everything had to go like this – not that it had to go like this, but to be satisfying, it had to go like this – and that ultimately, the choices that were made by the character and the people around the character led to this moment, this key moment. And I think we should talk about what makes an ending an ending, because it’s not just that it’s the thing that happens before credits roll. I’ve always thought the ending of a movie is defined by your main character performing some act of faith. And there’s a decision and there’s a faith in that decision to do something. And that is connected – it always seems to me it is connected through, all the way back to the beginning, in a very different way from what is there in the beginning. That’s the point is that there is an expression of faith in something that has changed, but there is a decision. There is a moment where that character does something that transcends and brings them out of what was, so that hopefully by the end of the movie, they are not the same person they were in the beginning. John: Either they have literally gotten to the place that you have promised the audience that they’re gonna get to, like if you have set up a location that they’re going to get to. Is Dorothy going to get back to Kansas? Well, you could have ended the movie when she got to Oz, or when she got to the Emerald City, because she was trying to get to the Emerald City, but her real goal was to get back to Oz, or to get back to Kansas. I’m confusing all my locations. Dorothy wants to get back to Kansas. If the movie doesn’t get us back to Kansas, we’re going to be frustrated. If she gets back to Kansas and we’re there for 10 more minutes, we’re going to be frustrated. The movie has promised us that she will get back to Kansas, or I guess she could die trying. That’s a valid choice too. Craig: I’d like to see that movie. John: That’s her literal stated goal. That’s her want. And there’s also her need. And her need is to, I guess, come to appreciate the people that’s she’s with, to find some independence. What is the need in Wizard of Oz? Craig: But that’s what I’m talking about when I say that the character must have some faith and a choice, and a decision that’s different. In the beginning of the movie, she leaves home. She runs away. John: That’s right. Craig: And at the end of the movie she has to have faith that by actually loving home, which she finally does now, she can return. And essentially, you can look at the entire movie in a very simple way as somebody saying to a runaway on the street, “Trust me, kid, if you want to go back home you can get back home. You just gotta want to go back home. I know you ran away. You made a stand. You thought you were grown up. The world is scary. It’s okay. You can go back home. They’ll take you back.” That’s what the Wizard of Oz is. The whole thing is a runaway story. And yet the ending – it’s funny; a lot of people have always said, “The ending, it’s deus ex machina. She just hands her the shoes. She could have given her the shoes and told her to click the heels in the beginning. We’d be done with this thing.” But the point is then, okay, fine, maybe that’s a little clumsy, but really more to the point, the ending is defined by faith and decision. And I think almost every movie, the wildest arrangement of movies – and look at Raiders of the Lost Ark. In the end he has faith. “Close your eyes, Marion.” That’s faith he didn’t he didn’t have in the beginning in something. It’s not always religious. The Ghostbusters decide, “We’re gonna cross the streams. We’re gonna have faith that we’re gonna do the thing we knew we weren’t gonna do. Forget fear. Let’s just go for it. It’s the only way we can save the world. We might die in the process, but we’re heroes now. We have faith in that.” I see it all the time. And I feel like when you’re crafting your ending and you’re trying to focus it through the lens of character as opposed to circumstance, finding that decision is such a big deal. John: Yeah. The ending of your movie is very rarely going to be defeating the villain or finding the bomb. It’s gonna be the character having achieved something that was difficult throughout the whole course of the movie. Sometimes that’s expressed as what the character wanted. More often, it’s expressed as what the character needed but didn’t realize he or she needed. And by the end of the movie, they’re able to do something they were not able to do at the start of the movie, either literally or because they’ve made emotional progress over the course of the movie that they can do something. Craig: Right. That’s exactly right. And it’s a great way of thinking about – sometimes we get lost in the plot jungle. And we look around and we think, “Well, this character could go anywhere and do anything.” Well, stop thinking about that and start thinking about what you want to say about life through your movie, because frankly, there’s not much more reason to watch movies. John: And we are specifically talking about movies, not TV shows. And a movie is really a two-hour, or 100-minute lens on one section of a character’s life, or one section of a cinematic world. And so you’re making very deliberate choices about how you’re starting. What are the first things we see? How are we gonna meet those characters? You have to make just as deliberate choices about where you’re going to end. What’s the last thing that we’re going to take out of this world? And why are we cutting out this slice of everything that could happen to show us in this time? And you will change your ending, just as you change your beginning. But you have to go in with a plan for where you think this is going to go to. Craig: No question. I think a huge mistake to start writing – and frankly, if you’re writing and you don’t know how the movie ends, you’re writing the wrong beginning, because to me, the whole point of the beginning is to be somehow poetically opposite the end. That’s the point. If you don’t know what you’re opposing here, I’m not really sure how you know what you’re supposed to be writing at all. John: In one of our first screenwriting classes, they forced us to write the first 30 pages and the last 10 pages, which seemed like a really brutal exercise but was actually very illuminating, because if you’ve written the first 30 and the last 10, you can write your whole movie, because you have to know everything that’s going to happen in there to get you to that last moment. Craig: I love it. John: And it makes you think very deliberately about what those last things are. And so I still try to write those last 10 pages pretty early on in the process while I still have enthusiasm about my movie, while I still love it, while I’m still excited about it. And so I’m not writing those last pages in a panic, and with coffee and momentum. I’m writing them with craft, and with detail, and with precision. And then I can write some of the middle stuff with some of that panic and looseness. If I’ve lost some of my enthusiasm, I can muscle through some of the middle parts, but I don’t want to muscle through my ending. I want the ending to be something that’s precise and exactly what this movie wants to be. Craig: I have the kind of OCD need to write chronologically. I can’t skip around at all. But I won’t start writing until I know the ending. And what I mean by ending, I mean I know what the character thought in the beginning of the movie, what he thinks differently in the end, why that difference is interesting, what decision he’s going to make, and then what action is he going to take that epitomizes his new state of mind. When we start thinking about what should the ending be, I think sometimes writers think about how big should the explosion be or which city should the aliens attack. And if you start thinking about what would be the best, most excruciating, difficult test of faith for my hero and his new outlook on life, or at least his new theoretical outlook on life – and Pixar does this better than anybody. And they do so much better than everybody. And it’s funny, because I really start thinking about endings this way because of Pixar films. I remember I was watching Up. And they got to that point where Carl had finally decided that kid was worth going back to save. He brought the house right to where he said he would bring it, and no, he’s gonna leave that and go back. And I like that, but I thought, that’s not quite that difficult of a test. And then, of course, see, Pixar knows that it wasn’t enough, that the real test to say “I have moved on” is to let that house go. They design the action of the climax in such a way to force Carl – the circumstances force Carl to let the house go to save the kid. And that’s the perfect example to me of how to think about writing a satisfying ending. That’s why that ending is satisfying. It’s not about the details. The details are as absurd as man on airship with Boy Scout; flying, talking dogs; and a house tied to him. No problem. You can make it work. John: An example I can speak to very specifically is the movie Big Fish, which really follows two story lines. And the implied contract with the audience is you know the father is going to die. It would be a betrayal of the movie if the father suddenly pulled out of it and the father wasn’t going to die. We know from the start of the movie that the father is going to die. The question of the movie is, will the father and son come to terms, will they reconcile before his death, and will this rift be amended? And so quite early on, I had to figure out like, what is it that the son can — the son is really the protagonist in the present day — what is it that the son can do at the end of the story that he couldn’t do at the start of the story? The son has to tell the story of the father’s death. And so knowing that that’s going to be incredibly difficult, emotionally trying thing to do, but I could see all that. I could feel that. Knowing that that was the moment I was leading up to, what is it that lets the son get to that point? And you’re really working backwards to, what are the steps that are going to get me to that point? And so it’s hearing someone else tell one of the father’s stories, in this case Jenny Hill, that fills in this missing chapter and sort of why that chapter is missing. That backtracks into, how big is the fight that set up this disagreement? What are the conversations along the way? Knowing I needed to lead up to that moment, knowing what that ending was, was what let me track the present day storyline back to the beginning. Craig: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. There was to be a connection between the beginning and the end. I am excited for the day that Identity Thief comes out, because I can sort of talk specifically about how that ending – the whole reason I wrote that movie, aside from liking it, was that I thought I had a very interesting dilemma for the character at the end, and that it was an interesting climax of decision. And the decision meant something. And it was interesting. And I like that. To me, it’s all about the ending like that. Looking forward to that one coming out. Hopefully people will like it. John: This talk of endings reminds me of – I met John Williams. At USC, the scoring stage is named the John Williams Scoring Stage. When they were rededicating it, John Williams was there, along with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and they were talking about the movies they worked on together. And John Williams made this really great point, that the music of a movie is the thing you take home with you. It’s like the goodie bag. It’s the one thing you as an audience member get to sort of recycle and play in your head is that last theme. So as I’m thinking about endings, that’s the same idea. What is that little melody? What is that moment that people are going to walk out of the theater with? And that’s your ending. And we’ve both made movies where we’ve gone through testing, and you’ll see that the smallest change in the ending makes this huge difference in how people react to your movie. Craig: Oh, for sure. John: It’s that last little thing that they take with them. Craig: Yeah. In fact, when people are testing movies that have sort of absurdly happy endings, what you’d call an uplifting film, you almost have to kind of discount the numbers. You’ll get a 98 and you’ll think, “It’s not really a 98.” At this point it doesn’t matter. It’s just that the ending was such a big thumb’s up. But if you ask these people tomorrow or the next day would they pay to go see it, you might get a different answer. And similarly, when you end on a bummer, or on a flat note, the air goes out of the theater, and people will struggle to explain why they did not like the movie, when in fact they just didn’t like the ending. John: But what I want to make sure that people who are listening – we are not arguing for happy endings. We’re not arguing that every movie needs to have a happy ending. It needs to have a satisfying ending that matches the movie that you’ve given them up to that point, and so one that tracks with the characters along the way. It doesn’t mean the character has to win. The character can die at the end, that’s absolutely fine, as long as the death is meaningful in the context of the movie that you’ve shown us. Craig: Yeah, and maybe just a little bit of hope. I always thought it was such a great choice by Clint Eastwood, the ending shot of Unforgiven, which really ends on a downer. This man struggled his whole life, most of his adult life, to be a good person, when inside in fact he was awful, and in a moment of explosion at the end, truly reveals the devil inside, kills everybody. We kind of sickly root for it. And then he goes back home. And it basically says he just died alone. And yet there’s something nice about the image, because while that’s rolling and we just dealt with all of that, the final images of him alone on his farm, putting some flowers down, I think by the grave of his dead wife, who we understand from the scroll is somebody that he truly loved and was good to, so that there is a bit of hope there. [Episode 170 Clip] John: So first up is this Five Types of Twist Endings, which is a blog post by Alec Worley. Whoever sent this to me, thank you because it was great. It’s been sitting in our show notes for a while. But it was really cool. This blog post talks through twist endings. It defines twist endings as “the moment of revelation within a story that throws into question all that’s gone before.” And it’s not hard for us to think about twist endings in movies, because some of my favorite movies have twist endings. Craig: Yeah, and I thought that this was a pretty good summary of how these things work. We can go through them one by one. I’ll take the first one, reversal of identity, in which someone turns out to be someone else. So your parent is actually not your parent but your grandparent. Your best friend is actually a shape-shifting monster. John: The Crying Game where the woman you love is not – Craig: Is not a woman. John: Ta-da. Craig: Ta-da. Or in Fight Club, Brad Pitt is not actually a person. He is your alter ego. John: That would also maybe play into the third version, which is the reversal of perception. And reversal of perception is the way you thought the universe was built is not the way the universe is actually built. And so there’s a fundamental thing that is not the way you thought it was. My movie The Nines has that aspect, where quite early on in the film you realize something bigger is going on. And so it’s not a twist in the sense of like, “Oh my gosh, I didn’t expect that at all.” But you know that there is a revelation coming, that the universe is bent in a way that you were not expecting. Craig: Yeah, the universe is a bent in a way or time is being bent in a way. Alec cites An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, which is an amazing short story by the great Ambrose Bierce and was clearly the inspiration for Jacob’s Ladder, in which it turns out the entire movie is the fantasy of someone as they are dying. John: Yeah. And short stories are actually a perfect place for twist endings to happen, because in some ways, a twist at the end of a novel could feel like a bit of a betrayal, but a short story, you have just the right amount of investment in the reality of the short story that the twist ending feels great and rewarding. Where I would wonder in a novel sometimes, you’ve spent eight hours on this thing, and then to say like, “Oh, I’m going to pull the rug out from under you,” might feel like a betrayal. Craig: No question. Twist endings have always been the stock and trade of science fiction and fantasy short story authors. In part, it works so well for short stories because a good twist makes sense of some confusing facts. And we can only bear to be confused for so long before we just give up. So short stories work beautifully for that. One of the other twist endings he identifies is the reversal of motive. I thought he was after this but he’s really after that. He cites Seven, where we realize in the end the serial killer isn’t actually helping them. He’s setting up Brad Pitt and Brad Pitt’s wife to become his final two victims. John: Obviously, reversal of motive is often found in comedies also, where you have a misunderstanding of what a character is trying to do and that’s sort of driving things. In the third section of Go, Burke and his wife, they seemed to be trying to seduce Adam and Zack, like some weird kinky sex thing is about to happen, and it’s revealed that they’re actually trying to sell them confederated products. Their motive was very different, and that was the surprise. That’s the jolt that you weren’t expecting. And part of what was fun about that is it was a good misdirect, because you’re like, “Oh, that’s the twist,” and then the next scene, you’re going to see that actually, Adam and Zack were a gay couple this whole time and they’ve been fighting. So sometimes you can misdirect twice or you can lead the audience into one misdirection and then surprise them with a second misdirection. Craig: Yeah, for sure. And some of these things overlap. What just popped into my mind is that great character from Monsters, Inc. I can’t remember her name but she’s the one who talks… She is both the reversal of identity and the reversal of motive. It turns out that she’s actually there undercover and she’s not a file clerk. “You forgot to file your paperwork.” But she’s the head of some sort of internal investigation and that was her motive. So those things always, you’re right, they work well in comedies. And here he also has reversal of fortune. This one was a little – I guess it’s kind of a twist ending. It’s really more of the kind of Monkey’s Paw theory. What you thought you were going to get, you’re not quite getting. John: Exactly. So it’s pulling defeat out of victory, or that thing that at the very end you realize like, oh, you actually didn’t get what you wanted. He cites someone we talked about before on the podcast, Emma Coats from Pixar, who writes, “Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.” And so this is basically, there’s a coincidence often at the end that ends up pulling the rug out from underneath that character. And that can be rewarding in the right kind of movie. I think of noir movies sometimes having this or certainly that Twilight Zone kind of fiction may have that, like suddenly at the end, the great and short version, where he finally has time to read and then he breaks his glasses. Craig: Yeah. This is the hallmark of the ironic ending. One of my favorite Simpsons jokes, it was a Halloween episode. Homer eats the forbidden donut. He sells his soul for a donut, doesn’t finish it, so he doesn’t have to go to Hell. But then he does finish it and he ends up in Hell and he’s sent to the Department of Ironic Punishment, where he’s put on a conveyor belt and- John: And force-fed doughnuts. Craig: … force-fed donuts, except that he never stops eating the doughnuts. He’s perfectly happy to eat as many donuts as they give him. And the demon says, “I don’t understand. James Coco broke in 15 minutes.” Anyway, this would be the Department of Ironic Punishment. And then we have reversal of fulfillment. John: Which I found the most challenging of the ones he described, and how you differentiate that from reversal of fortune. Craig: Yeah. And so what he’s saying is, somebody is going to achieve is kind of subverted by what somebody else achieves. And I think the best example he gives is O. Henry’s Gift of the Magi, where two people individually sell their most beloved possession to sacrifice for the other and then find out that they’ve done this. John: It’s not only that they’ve done this, but one of them has bought a comb, but she’s sold all her hair. Craig: Right, that the gifts are now useless for each other. Yeah, that works. That sort of, kind of is also- John: It’s ironic too. Craig: It’s a reversal of fortune in a sense too. John: Yeah. What I think is important about all these discussions about the twist ending is it’s really looking at, what does the reader know? What does the reader know at every moment in the course of the story? Because in order to create one of these twist endings to make sense, the entire narrative has to make sense without the twist, and so that the journey you’re going on seems to make sense. And then when you provide the twist ending, the reader needs to be able to go back and say, “Oh, it still completely makes sense with this new information.” So you’re withholding a crucial piece of information, and then at the end, providing it, and that changes the perception of everything that came before it. And that could be a rewarding experience for the reader. It can also be a very frustrating experience for a reader. And if that’s the only thing your story has going for it, it’s unlikely, I think, to be completely satisfying. Craig: That’s right. I think you can see the problem in the progression of the career of M. Night Shyamalan. You don’t want to start with this edict that the twist rules all. It does not. The script that I’m writing now is essentially a neo-Agatha Christie whodunit. All of Agatha Christie’s stories had a twist ending, all of them, because the person that you thought did it wasn’t the one who did it, and you never could figure out who did it, and then you find out. And she used these reversals of identity and motive all the time. Interestingly, never a reversal of perception, a reversal of fortune or fulfillment. It was always the motive and the identity were the things that were constantly shifting with her. And what’s so interesting about her success as a writer was that she understood that her audience knew it was coming. And that’s quite a high-wire act to do when you… We all went and saw The Sixth Sense. I wasn’t sitting there thinking, “I wonder what the twist is.” I just watched the movie and enjoyed the twist. But no one sits down to an Agatha Christie book and thinks, “Well-” John: “Well, this is going to be straightforward. I am going to know who did it.” Craig: Yeah, it’s like a true crime story or something. John: There’s a meta level of expectation, that she has to write the story knowing that everybody is expecting there to be a twist ending. So therefore, everyone is going to be reading everything she writes into it with the expectation of like, “Oh, but that’s not really true.” And so she has to both honor that expectation and then surpass it in ways that continue to be rewarding and surprising. And so that’s a challenging thing. What the frustration would be is if Agatha Christie ever tried to write just a straight story, something that didn’t have that at all, everyone would be a little bit weirded out by it. I could imagine her writing under pen names, because anything with the Agatha Christie brand on it is going to feel like, well, that has to be that situation. M. Night Shyamalan has a similar kind of jinx to him, because three times is certainly a pattern. Craig: No, for sure. Frankly, it’s started to feel a little desperate. We don’t want to feel like our filmmakers are sweating to cook us the meal that they think we want. We want them to be expressing something competently, and then we can enjoy it along with them. By the way, Agatha Christie’s first big hit novel was called The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I think it was called The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. And at that time, she was a new member of this mystery writers of England organization. That’s not the real name, but it was essentially that. And this caused a huge uproar with the mystery writers organization, because they felt she had violated the rules of the craft, because the twist… The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a first-person account. A guy is living in this little town. Hercule Poirot is renting the house next to him. He describes how a man is murdered and Poirot goes about attempting to solve the crime. And at the end, spoiler alert, it turns out the murderer is the narrator. And everyone just lost their crap over this. But boy, it really works in the novel. It’s great. John: Yeah, we like that. In many ways, I think that’s that kind of reversal of expectation. That’s a reversal of the form in a certain way. You thought this was going to play by the rules, and it’s not playing by the rules at all. And I certainly love that when that happens. It reminds me of Too Many Cooks. I don’t know if you’ve seen Too Many Cooks yet. Craig: It’s my One Cool Thing. John: Oh my god. Too Many Cooks is fantastic. And so I will let it remain your One Cool Thing. But I think that also reverses the form. You have an expectation of like, oh, I know what this is. I know what it’s parodying. Craig: Repeatedly. John: Repeatedly. And then, through its length and its form and just how nuts it goes, it becomes something really transcendent. Craig: Indeed. [Episode 366 Clip] Craig: My fondest kind of episode is the one where we talk about craft, probably mostly because I just want to put film schools out of business. It’s not, with me, as always, any kind of pro-social thing. This is more vindictive. It seemed to me that one of the things we hadn’t talked about over the course of our many, many, many episodes is the end. Not the end the way people normally talk about the end, when we say, “How does the movie end?” Usually, people are talking about the climax. There’s all sorts of stuff to be said about the dramatic climax of a film and how it functions and why it is the way it is. But the real end of the movie comes after. The real end is the denouement, as the French call it, and this is the moment after the climax, when things have settled down. And there’s actually a ton of interesting things going on in there. It is the very last thing people see. And it’s an important thing. I’ll tell you who understands the value of a good denouement. The people that test films. They’ll tell you. If you have a comedy and you have one last terrific joke there, it’ll send your scores up through the roof. If you have one last little bit of something between two characters that feels meaningful, it’ll send your scores through the roof. The last thing we get is, in a weird way, the most important. I wanted to talk through the denouement, why it is there, and what it’s supposed to be doing. John: Great. “Denouement” is a French word. “Denoue” is to untie, to unknot something. It’s interesting that it’s to unknot something, because we think about the tying everything up, but you also think about undoing all the tangles that your story has created, sort of like straightening things out again so that you can leave the theater feeling the way we want you to feel. As we’re talking through, if we’re imagining the prototypical 120-page screenplay, these are the very last few pages. Correct, Craig? Craig: Yeah. Absolutely. This is after the dust has settled. There’s going to be inevitably something, and we’ll talk through it. For instance, sometimes it’s one single shot. Typically, it’s its own scene. But there’s something to let you know this is the denouement. I guess the first thing we should do is draw a line between climax and denouement and say, okay, what is the difference here? And the climax, I think we all get the general gist there. It’s action, choices, decision, conflict, sacrifice. And all of it is designed to achieve some sort of plot impact. In the climax you save the victim or you defeat the villain, you stop the bomb, you win the – whatever it is that the plot is doing. That’s what happens there. And the climax dramatically serves as a test of the protagonist. And the test is, have you or have you not become version 2.0 of yourself? You started at version 1.0. We know some sort of change needed to happen to make you better, fix you, heal you, unknot you. Have you gotten there yet? This is your test. And at the end of the climax, we have evidence that the character has in fact transformed into character 2.0. The denouement, which occurs after this, to me is about proof that this is going to last, that this isn’t just a momentary thing, but rather, life has begun again, and this is the new person. This is the new reality. John: Absolutely. In setting up your film, you sort of establish a question for this principal character. Will they be able to accomplish this thing? Will they be able to become the person who can meet this final challenge? In that climax, they have met that final challenge. They have succeeded in that final challenge generally, and we’ve come out of this. But was it just a one-time fluke thing, or are they always going to be this way? Have they transformed into something that is a lasting transformation? And that is what you’re trying to do in these last scene or scenes is to show this is a thing that is really resolved for them. Craig: Yeah. And that is why so many denouements will begin with six months later, one year later, because you want to know that, okay, if the denouement here is right, I used to crash weddings like a cad, but now I’m crashing my own friend’s wedding, because I need to let this woman know that I really do love her and I’ve changed. And she says, “Okay.” We need six months later, one year later, to know, yep, they did change, they’re still together, they’re now crashing weddings together as a couple. They have this new reality, but it is lasting and their love is real. We need it, or else we’re left wondering, “Oh, hmm, all right, but did they make it or not?” Now that said, sometimes your denouement can happen in an instant and then the credits roll. And it’s enough because of the nature of the instant, particularly if it’s something that is a very stark, very profound reward that has been withheld for most of the movie. Karate Kid maybe has the shortest denouement in history. Climax: Daniel wins the karate fight. Denouement: Mr. Miyagi smiles at him. That’s it. But that smile is a smile that he has not earned until that moment. And when he gets that smile, you know that he’s good. This is good. John: As we’re talking, I’m thinking back through some of my movies. In Go, the denouement is they’ve gone back to the car at the end, and Manny’s final question is, “So what are we doing for New Years?” It’s establishing that like they’ve been through all of this drama, but they’re back on a normal track to keep doing sort of exactly what they’ve been doing before, that the journey of the movie has gotten them back to the place where they can take the same journey the next week, which is the point of the movie. In Big Fish, certainly the climax is getting Edward to the river. There’s a moment post-climax where they’re at the funeral and see all the real versions of folks. But the actual denouement as we’re describing it right now is that six months later, probably actually six years later, where the son is now born and saying like, “Oh, did all that really happen?” and the father says, “Yep, every word.” Essentially, we see the son buying into the father’s stories in the sense that there’s a legacy that will live on. They’re very short scenes. They’re probably not the scenes you remember most in the movie, but they are important for sending you out of there thinking, “The characters are on a trajectory I want them to be on.” Craig: Yeah. The climax of Identify Thief is that Melissa McCarthy’s character gives herself up so that Jason Bateman’s character can be free of her and the identity theft and live with his life, which is a huge deal. That’s a self-sacrifice she does because of what he’s helped her to see, and that’s what he’s now learned from her. And the denouement, which is important, is to see, okay, it’s a year later and she’s in prison, which was really important to say, “Look, it’s real. She went to prison.” But what’s happening? Jason and Amanda, who plays his wife, they’ve had their baby and everything is okay. He’s got a great new job. He’s doing fine. She’s been working hard in prison and studying so that she can get out and come work for him. And he then has something for her, which is he’s found her real name, because she doesn’t know who she is. And he found her birth certificate and found her real name. And so you get a kind of understanding that this relationship did not just stop right there, and it could have – she was a criminal – but it didn’t, and that they’re going to go on and on. And then she punches a guard in the throat, because the other thing about the denouement is typically it is a full circling of your movie. And it is in the denouement that you have your best chance for any kind of fun or touching full circle moment. So in Identity Thief, you have both. She at one point says she doesn’t know her real name. Here we find out her real name, which is Dawn Budgie, which is the worst name ever. And the way she met him originally was by punching him in the throat. And here’s she going to go ahead and punch a guard in the throat, because you change but you don’t change completely, because that feels gloppy, right? But both of those things are full circle moments. And in the denouement, if you can find those, or if you’re wondering what to do in your denouement, start thinking about that and looking for that little callback full circle moment. It is incredibly satisfying in that setting. John: Yep. And a crucial point I think you’re making here is that the denouement is not about plot. It’s about story and theme, but it’s not about sort of the A-plot of your movie. Your A-plot is probably all done. It’s paying off things you’ve set up between your characters. It’s really paying off relationships generally. It’s how you are wrapping things up. It’s showing what has changed in the relationships between these characters and giving us a sense of what those relationships are going to be like going forward. Craig: Oh, and that’s a great point too. You’re absolutely right that it is showing what has changed, and therefore it’s also showing what hasn’t changed, which can sometimes be just as important. For instance, if your theme is “all you need is love,” then it is important to show in the denouement that, okay, our protagonist has found love. She now has fulfilled that part of her life. But the other things that maybe she had been chasing aren’t there. If your problem is, “Okay, my character is Vanessa. And Vanessa thinks that it’s more important to be successful than to be loved,” which is an incredibly trite movie – I apologize to Vanessa – at the end, if she’s found love, I think maybe that’s good. I don’t need also then success, because then I start to wonder, okay, what was the lesson here? Sometimes you just want to show nothing has changed except one thing. At the end of Shrek, he still lives in a swamp and he is still an ogre, but he’s not alone. One thing changes. The denouement is very good for almost using the scientific method to change one variable and leave the others constant. John: Absolutely. You’re saying that if you did try to change a bunch of variables, so if the character ended up in a completely different place, in a whole new world than how they started, then we would still have a question about what is their life going to be like. We just don’t understand how they fit into all these things. But by changing the one thing, we can carry our knowledge of the rest of their life and see that and just make that one change going forward. Craig: Yeah. Exactly. It’s a chance for you to not have to worry about propelling anything forward, but rather, letting people understand something is permanent. And permanent in a lovely way. Very often the denouement will dot-dot-dot off, the way that a lot of songs just fade out. Some songs have a big (sings) and that’s your end, and you can do that. And some of them just fade out, which is also lovely. The end of Casablanca is a brilliant little fade-out. He says goodbye to Ilsa. She’s off on the plane. The plot of the Nazis is over. Everything is finished. And then two men just walk off and say, “You know what? I think this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” And therein is a dot-dot-dot. And they just walk off into the fog. A plane takes off. And you understand more adventures are ahead, but for now everything is okay. John: Yeah. It’s nice when you get a sense that there will be further stories. We don’t necessarily need to see the sequel, but you get a sense of where they’re generally headed and that you don’t need to be worrying about them an hour later from now. Here’s the counter example. Imagine you’re watching this film, you’re watching Casablanca, and for some reason the last 10 minutes get cut off, like the film breaks. That is incredibly jarring, because you’ve not been safely placed back down. There’s a social contract that happens when a person starts watching a movie. It’s like the writer and the filmmakers say, “If you give me about two hours of your time, I will make it worth your while. You trust me, and I will take you to a place and I will deposit you back safely where you started.” And if you are not putting people back safely where they started, they’re not going to have a good reception, a good reaction. And that’s what you find when you do audience testing is so often what’s not working about the movie is that they didn’t feel like they got to the place where they expected to be delivered. Craig: Yeah. And I suspect that people reasonably invest an enormous amount of time, energy, and thought into building their climaxes, and then the denouement becomes an afterthought. And for me it is the actual ending. That’s actually the ending I back up from is the denouement. John: Let’s talk about that literally, because I literally do write those last few pages very early on in the process. I don’t know if you do that as well. But sometime after I’ve crossed the midpoint of a script, I will generally jump forward and write the last 10 pages, so some of that climax but really it’s that denouement. What are the final images of the movie? What are the final moments, the final words of a movie? Because if I know that, I know where I’m going, that second half of the script is much tighter and better and cleaner for where I’m headed towards. Also, I like to write those last couple pages while I still have enthusiasm about the movie. So often, you’ll read endings of scripts and you kind of feel like people were just rushing through the end. It’s like they were on a deadline and just plowed through those last pages and they spent so much time on their first act and spent so little time on those last 10 pages, which are sort of loose and sloppy because of when they were written. Craig: That just infuriates me, the very thought of it, because I obsess over those the way I obsess over the first 10. And I don’t write out of order the way you do. But I think I plan very stringently in a way that you don’t. I try and write the movie before I write the movie, essentially. And so I definitely know what those things are. And I don’t really have spikes or dips of excitement. I think you write the way people probably think I write, and I write probably the way people think you write. John: Probably so. Craig: I’m very robotic about it in a certain kind of procedural way. Creatively, obviously, inside the robot management, I go all over the place and lop the heads off of giraffes and so forth. But yeah, I’m a big planner. John: I’m very instinctual, and I will not know necessarily what the next scene is as I’m writing the current scene. Craig: You know what? I think you and I just are so surprising to each other. John: Let’s wrap up this conversation of denouement, because the denouements are about wrapping things up. The key takeaways we want people to get from a denouement is that it is a resolution of not plot, but of theme, of relationship, of the promise you’ve made to the audience about these principal characters and what is going to happen going forward. What else do we want people to know? Craig: That is essentially what they’re going to do. You’re going to show them that last bit. Whether you’ve done a good job or a poor job, when they see the last bit of the movie, they will in their minds add on the following words: “And thus it shall always be.” And if you have done it well, “and thus it shall always be” will be really comforting and wonderful for them. By the way, sometimes it’s not comforting. Sometimes it’s sad. John: True. Craig: Honestly, the denouement of Chernobyl is quite sad and bittersweet. No shock there. Fiddler on the Roof has one of the best denouements of all time. Fiddler on the Roof opens with a guy playing this (sings). It’s very jaunty and he’s on a roof and it’s silly. And Tevye is talking to the audience and saying, “Our life is hard and it’s tricky. And we’re like a fiddler on the roof trying to scratch out a simple little tune without breaking your neck.” At the end of the show, they have been driven from their town of Anatevka by pogroms and they’re trudging off to a new home. And the fiddler is the last person to go, and he plays that same little tune, but it’s so sad this time. And the denouement is there to say “and thus it shall always be,” meaning we know based on the timeframe that what follows the people who leave Anatevka in whenever that takes place – let’s just call it 1910 – is going to be worse. And it’s going to get worse before it gets better, and thus it shall always be. It doesn’t always have to be “and happily ever after.” Sometimes it can be “and sadly ever after.” But the point is it will be thus, and it shall thus always be. If you think about it that way, the denouement becomes incredibly important, because that’s where you’re sealing the fate of every single character in your film. John: Yeah. Everyone is going to be frozen in that little capsule that you’ve created there, and that can be placed up on the shelf. That is the resolution for this world that you’ve built to contain this story. That’s why it’s so crucial that it feel rewarding; so whether it was a happy ending or a sad ending, that it feels like an ending. [Episode 392 Clip] John: Our big marquee topic I want to get into today is the final moment in movies, or I guess episodes of TV, but I’m really thinking more in movies. And this came to mind this morning because there was an article talking about the end of Captain Marvel. This is not even really a spoiler, but at the end of the original version of Captain Marvel, she flew off into space, and they changed it so she flew off into space with some other characters. And it was an important change and giving you a sense of where the character was headed next. And it got me thinking that in pretty much every movie I’ve written, that last moment, that last beat has changed from the pitch to the screenplay to the movie. And I want to focus on why that moment is so important and also why it tends to change so much. Craig: Interesting. And it’s funny because for me, because I’m obsessed with that moment, it doesn’t change much for me. But that’s in a sense because I think I weirdly start with it. I don’t know. John: I start with it too. And so as I was thinking back to Aladdin, my pitch for it had a very specific runner that had a very definite end beat. And so when I pitched it to Disney and also I just pitched it casually to Dana Fox, it made Dana Fox cry, that last line, the last image of that last moment. It’s not in the movie at all. It totally changed in ways that things change. But I would say even the movies like Big Fish and other things which have been very much “we shot the script,” those last moments and sometimes the last image really does change, because it’s based on the experience of sitting through the whole movie and where it’s delivered it to. Let’s talk about that last moment as a way of organizing your thoughts when you’re first thinking about the story, and then what it looks like at all the different stages. Craig: To start with, we have to ask what the purpose is. I think sometimes people think of the last shot in cinematic terms. Somebody rides off into the sunset. The last shot really is about sunsets, but of course it’s not. For me, the final moment, the final shot, that last image contains the purpose of the entire thing. Everything comes down to that. If your movie was about the love between two people, then that is that final moment. We’ve talked about Lindsay Doran’s Ted Talk where she talks about how movies are really about relationships. She would cite how sometimes she would ask people what was the last image of some movie, The Karate Kid, and a lot of people don’t remember it’s Mr. Miyagi’s face, proud. It’s Daniel and then Mr. Miyagi looking at each other, and there’s pride. Figuring out the purpose of that last shot is kind of your step one of determining what it’s supposed to be. And you can’t get there unless you know what the hell your whole movie is about in the first place. John: Yeah. I mean, movies are generally about a character taking a journey, a character leaving home and getting to some place. But it’s also about the movie itself starting at a place and getting to a place. And that destination is generally that last beat, that last moment, that last image. And so of course you’re going to be thinking about that early on in the process, of where do you want to end up. And way back in Episode 100, there was a listener question and someone asked us, “I have a couple different ideas for movies and I’m not sure which one I should start writing.” And my answer was, “You should pick the one with the best ending because that’s the one you’ll actually finish.” And if you start writing without having a clear sense of where you’re going to, you’re very likely to either stop writing it or get really off track and having to sort of strip away a lot of what you’ve done. Having a clear sense of “this is where I think the movie lands” is crucial. It’s like “the plane is going to land on this runway” tells you, okay, I can do a bunch of different stuff, but ultimately I have to make sure that I’m headed to that place. You may not be signaling that even to the reader, to the audience, so that they’re not ahead of you, but you yourself have to know where this is going. Craig: John, when you were in grade school and you had some sort of arts and crafts assignment, and the teacher said you need to draw a circle, and you just have to draw a circle, you don’t have a thing to trace, were you a good circle drawer? John: I was a fair circle drawer. I know it’s a very classic artistic lesson is how to trust your hand to do the movements and how to think of what a circle is. Were you a good circle drawer? Craig: No. Absolutely horrendous. If you ask me to draw a circle, you would end up with some sort of unclosed cucumber. And the reason I bring this up is because to me, the classic narrative is a circle. We begin in a place and we end in that same place. There is a full return. Of course we are changed, but the ending reflects the beginning. The beginning reflects the ending. There is a circle. If you don’t know your ending and you don’t know how the circle finishes, it’s quite probable that you won’t know how to start the circle either, that you will end up with an unclosed cucumber, like nine-year-old Craig Mazin attempting to draw someone’s head. This is how things go off. This is where, I think, people can easily get lost as they’re writing their script, because they realize that the story has developed in such a way that it wants to end somewhere, but it has really not a strong click, connection to the beginning. One of my favorite albums is Pink Floyd’s The Wall. I think it’s just Pink Floyd The Wall. And Pink Floyd The Wall, they play little games, the Pink Floyd folks did. And one of the games they play in Pink Floyd The Wall is very low volume at the very beginning. You hear this tiny little song, and then someone says, “We came in.” And then at the very end, the very end, they’re playing the song and it finishes, and then you hear someone say, “Isn’t this where?” And that’s exactly the kind of thing that blows a 15-year-old boy’s mind, but also, it was satisfying. You felt things were connected, and they chose to make the very last moment some sort of indication that the beginning is relevant. It’s the way, frankly, Watchmen ends. It’s the same thing. There’s this beautiful come-around with that last final look. John: Now, because we’re talking about narrative circles, I need to acknowledge that Dan Harmon has this whole structure thing that’s based on a circle, where there’s a circle and there’s these little lines across it that the characters go on this journey. That’s absolutely a valid approach if you want to think about story that way. That’s not quite what we’re talking about. We’re talking about how in general a character leaves from a place and gets to a place, but in both cases they’re either finding a new home or returning to a previous home changed. And so just a character walking around in a circle isn’t a story. A character being profoundly changed and coming to this environment with a new understanding, that is a change. And sometimes it won’t be that one character. Sometimes the narrative question you’ve asked at the beginning of the story has gone through all these permutations and landed you back at a place that lets you look at that question from a new way. So it’s either answering the question or reframing the question in a way that is more meaningful. So that’s what we’re talking about. The narrative comes full circle. There’s a place that you were headed, and that place that you were headed reflects where you began. Craig: No question. And it’s really clear to us how someone has changed when we put them back where they were when we met them. It’s just one of those things where you can say, “Oh, here’s the variable.” Where we begin is the control. Our character is the variable. Start in the beginning, get me to the end, and let me see the difference. And sometimes it’s very profound. We start and end in the same place in Finding Nemo, but we can see how different it is in the same place, because the variable has changed, and that’s your character. John: I’m finishing the third Arlo Finch book right now, which is the end of the trilogy. Each of the books has had that sense of reflecting where the book began and where the book ended and there is a completion there. But it’s been fun to actually see the whole trilogy. And it’s like, okay, this is the journey that we went on over the course of this year of Arlo Finch’s life. And yes, he’s physically in the same space, but he’s a completely different character in that same space and has a different appreciation for what’s happened. Being able to go back to previous locations where things have happened, you see that his relationship to them is completely different, because he’s a different character, having been changed by what’s gone on. That’s what we’re really talking about with that last beat and how the last beat has to reflect where the character started and what has happened to the character over the course of the journey. Craig: Yeah. Reading Arlo Finch, you would never expect that he would end up a savage murderer, but he does. John: It’s really shocking for middle-grade fiction. Craig: It is. But then when you look back, you go, “Oh yeah, you know what? He was laying the groundwork for that all along. Actually, it makes sense. He’s a nightmare.” Then there’s the Dark Finch trilogy that comes next. Oh, you know what? Dark Finch trilogy is not a bad idea. John: Dark Finch sounds pretty good. Craig: You should do it. John: I think it’s going to be a crossover with Derek Haas’s books about his assassin. Craig: Oh yeah. Silver Bear. John: Silver Bear. Craig: Silver Bear. Dark Finch. That sounds like a Sondheim lyric. I love it. John: Oh, yeah. Craig: I love it. When I’m thinking about these last images, everybody has a different way of thinking about this. But what I try and do really is actually think about it in terms of a last emotion. What is it that I want to feel at the end? Do I want to feel comfort? Do I want to feel pride? Do I want to feel love? Do I want to feel hope? The movie that I worked on with Lindsay Doran, which is I think my favorite feature script, and so of course it hasn’t been made. They make the other ones, not those. The last shot to me was always an expression of the kind of bittersweet salute to the people who are gone. It’s a coming-of-age story. And the last shot, when I just thought about the emotion at the end, the emotion at the end was the kind of sad thankfulness for having known someone who’s no longer with you. I go, “Okay, I can wrap myself in that.” That feels like a good emotion. And I know how that is reflected by the beginning. How you then express it, that can change- John: For sure. Craig: … and often changes frequently. But this is an area where I think movies sometimes fail, because the system of movies is designed to separate the writer and her intention from the actual outcome. A writer will have an intention like, “I want my movie to end with the bittersweet thankfulness for those who are no longer with us. That is my emotional intention, and here is how I would execute it.” Nobody else sees the intention underneath, or they don’t understand it, and they just go, “You know what? We don’t like necessarily the way they’re executing that. Let’s make a new execution. Let’s do this. Let’s do that. Let’s make it noisy. Let’s make it loud. Let’s make it funny.” And the intention is gone. And then you get to the movie and you show it, and people go, “Well, the ending.” And you’re like, “Yeah, the ending. That writer never really nailed the ending.” You see how it goes? It’s just freaking brutal. John: Yeah. That’s never happened to me once in my career. Let’s talk about what that ending looks like in the different stages. In the pitch version of it, obviously we talked about in pitches that I would describe it as you’re trying to convince your best friend to see this movie that you’ve seen, that they’ve not seen. You’re really talking a lot about the characters and how it starts. And you may simplify and summarize some things, especially in the second and third act about stuff. But you will tend to describe out that last moment, that last beat, because you’re really talking about what is the takeaway experience going to be for a person who has watched this movie that you’re hopefully going to be writing. In a pitch, you’re going to have a description of what that last moment is, because that’s really important. It’s the reason why someone should say yes to reading your script, to buying your script, to hiring you to write that script. That last moment is almost always going to be there in the pitch, even if it’s not fully fleshed out, to give you a sense of what you want the audience and the readers to take away from reading the script. Craig: What I’m thinking about in a room where I’m relaying something to somebody is ultimately how do I want them to – I want to give them a fuzzy at the end. I want to give them some sort of fuzzy feeling. I don’t want to give them plot. If I finish off with plot… For instance, let’s say I’m in a room and I’m pitching Star Wars. What I don’t want to do is get to the end and say, “And in our last shot, our hero receives a medal, which he deserved.” What I want to talk about is how a kid – I would bring it back to the beginning and say, “This farm boy who didn’t know about this world beyond him, who didn’t know about the Force, who didn’t know about the fate of his father or the way he can maybe save the world, he is the one who saved the galaxy. And at last he knows who he is.” See, some sort of sense of connected feeling to the beginning. If you’re selling plot at the end, then what you’re really selling is what Lindsay Doran calls the end that people think is the end, but not the actual end. John: Let’s take your example of Star Wars, because you might pitch it that way, but then when it comes to writing the script, you actually have to write this scene that gets you to that moment. And so as you’re writing that scene at the last moment, you’re looking at what is the medal ceremony like, who is there, what is said, but most importantly, what is the emotional connection between those characters who are up there; actually painting out the world so we can see like, okay, this is why it’s going to feel this way. This is clearly the intention behind this scene, but also, I’m giving you the actual things you need to give us that feeling at the end. And so in the script stage, what was a nebulous description of like, “This is what it’s going to feel like,” has to actually deliver on that promise. Craig: Yeah. I hate being the guy who’s like, “Would it be better if a movie that everybody loved ended like this?” But the last shot of Star Wars, it’s the medal ceremony. And then you have them looking at each other, and so the emotion is the relationships between them. But I always wondered what would happen if the last-last shot of Star Wars was Luke Skywalker returning back to Tatooine a different man and starting a new hope, that vibe of returning. I always wondered if I would feel more at the end if I saw him return. John: I think it’s worth exploring. I think if you were to try to do that though, it would just feel like one more beat. It would feel like the movie was over when he got the medal and you had this swell. The journey was this is a kid who is all on his own, who forms a new family, so going back to where his dead family was wouldn’t feel like the victory. Craig: Dead family. John: Dead family. I think you want to see his joy and excitement rather than the – I imagine the music would be very different if he had gone back to Tatooine at the end. It wouldn’t feel like a triumph. Craig: Yeah, it would be like (sings). You’re right. And I guess then the payload for that final bit is really the looks between Leia and Luke, and Han and Luke, that it’s, “We’re a family. We’re friends. We did it. We went through something nobody else understands.” John: Let’s say you’ve written the script, you’ve gone into production, and 100 days of production, there’s finally a cut, and you see that last moment in the film, and it’s different, or it doesn’t work, or the way you had it written on the page doesn’t work. In my experience, it’s generally because the actual movie that you watched isn’t quite the movie that’s on the page, just naturally. And as people are embodying those characters, things just feel different. Obviously, some scenes get cut, things get moved around. And where you thought you were headed is not really where you’ve ended up. And so you have to make some sort of change there. In some cases, it’s reshoots. In some cases, you’re really shooting a new last scene. You realize this was not the moment that we thought we wanted to get to at the end. But in some cases, it is just a matter of this shot versus that shot. Whose close-up are we ending on? You talk about Mr. Miyagi. I bet they tried it a bunch of different ways. And it would make more sense to end on Daniel rather than Mr. Miyagi, but ultimately, Mr. Miyagi was the right choice. They’re thinking about, “What does the music feel like at this moment? How are we emotionally landing the payload here?” And the music is going to be a big factor. There’s going to be a lot of things conspiring to get that last image, that last moment of the movie. And you may not have been able to anticipate that on the page. Craig: No question. And this is why it’s really important for you to understand your intention, because it may work out that your intention didn’t carry through in the plan. But if we know the intention and we have married the beginning to the end, then the beginning has set up this inexorable domino effect. You have landed at the end. You require a feeling. Let’s see if we can make that feeling editorially a different way. And if we can’t, okay, let’s go back and reconsider what it’s supposed to be. In rare circumstances, you do get to a place where you realize, “Oh my god, having gone through this movie, it’s really about this. It turns out we care more about this than this. This relationship matters more than this relationship.” Okay. Now, we have to think of the beginning. Let’s recontextualize what our beginning means, and then let’s go ahead and fix an ending. But the ending can never be just, “Do you know what? It just needs to be more exciting.” That’s nonsense. John: The danger is a lot of times in test screenings, they’ll see like, okay, the numbers are a little bit low here and people dipped at the end, so let’s add some more razzmatazz to this last little beat, or an extra thing. And generally, people don’t want more. They don’t want bigger or more. They just want to actually exit the movie at the right time with the right emotion. And that’s the challenge. Craig: How do you leave them feeling is the biggest. John: Sometimes though, the opposite holds true. Just this last week, I was watching a rough cut of a friend’s film. And he has this really remarkable last shot, and these two characters and their relationship has changed profoundly. But as I watched it, I was like, “Oh that’s a really great last shot, last moment for kind of a different movie than I saw.” But when I looked at the movie I had seen before that, it’s like, oh yeah, you could actually do some reconfiguring to get you to that moment and actually have it make sense. It was really talking about, like, “This is where we get to at the end. I think you’re not starting at the right place. And so therefore, you may want to take a look at those first scenes and really change our expectations and change what we’re following over the course of the movie, because doing that, you could land at that place and it would feel really meaningful.” Craig: Again, the beginning is the end is the beginning. If something is not working in that, where your circle is supposed to connect up, and you ended up with an open cucumber, then either the ending is wrong or the beginning is wrong or they’re both wrong. But it’s usually one or the other. And it is I think tempting at times to say, since the ending is the last thing, everything else is the pyramid, and then this thing that sits atop the pyramid, this is the easiest thing to fix. John, you’re absolutely right. Sometimes the easiest thing to fix is the beginning. John: Yeah. Change the expectations of the audience as they go into it, and you can get them there. Craig: Match them to where they’re going to arrive. [End of Clips] John: We are back here for the end of this episode to do a classic thing we do at the end of every episode, which is our One Cool Things. Mine was an article I read this past week by Andrew Van Dam, writing for The Washington Post. It’s called “America’s best decade, according to data.” If people talk about like, “Oh, things today are terrible,” well, when were things good? When you ask them these questions, was it the ’90s, the ’80s, the ’70s? It turns out it was when people were young is when things were good. Generally, people remember things being better at their time. Starting a little bit before they were born up until their teenage years was the best time according to most people. Drew: Are there any outliers, or do we ever feel like it’s not our youth? John: This article didn’t really point to any areas in which there was notable exceptions to that rule. But by any objective measure, most things are better for most people right now. It’s hard to see that when you’re in the middle of it. Drew: That’s crazy, because it was objectively the ’90s. Megana: Because you were such a young man, I feel weird asking this, but do you find that to be true? John: That what, the ’90s were the best decade? Megana: No, when you were younger. John: You do have some sort of halcyon vision of how things were, but no, I don’t personally think things were better in the ’70s or ’80s as I was growing up. It was easier for me because I was a kid, but that was a time before the internet. The world wasn’t better before the internet. For all the challenges the internet has brought, it’s also a good thing that I wouldn’t want to give up. There’s a lot of stuff that’s better about living now, so I’ll take it. Megana, something to share with the audience? Megana: Yeah. I just finished this book. I just finished Miranda July’s latest book called All Fours. She’s a filmmaker and a screenwriter and a novelist. I don’t know how to describe this book without giving too much away or being too reductive, because you could say that it’s this coming-of-age midlife crisis for this woman who finds herself in her late 40s and dealing with her body aging. But I just find Miranda July’s writing to be so delicious and intoxicating. It just completely swept me away for the two days that I was reading this book. If you have travel or summer plans coming up, I would definitely recommend a read. John: Awesome. I’m traveling, so I’m excited to read. I’ll add it to the list. I actually met Miranda July at one of the Sundance filmmakers’ labs along the way. My proposal to her, which was almost literally a proposal, is we should get married and have a daughter named June so she could be June July August. It was just there. It was out there. She’s lovely. I think we would’ve made a great couple. Megana: I think that that is how those decisions should be made. John: We are so suited for each other. Drew, what is your One Cool Thing? Drew: My One Cool Thing is an app called Callipeg. It’s an animation app. You can do it on your iPad. To unlock all the things, it’s two bucks a month or something like that. But I’ve used it to make little things. You can rotoscope really easily on it. It is just fantastically useful if you want to just make a quick sketch animation thing. You don’t have to know – I don’t know how to actually animate. Using it takes a little bit of time. But it’s really fun and I love it. John: We’ll put a link in the show notes to this, but spell it for us so we can look for it easily. Is it Callipeg with a K or with a C? Drew: It’s with a C. It’s C-A-L-L-I-P-E-G. It’s a French animation app. John: Excellent. Megana: How fun. John: Nice. That is our show for this week. Thank you to Drew and to Megana, our producers. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli, who also did our classic outro this week. Matthew, thank you. Matthew, for folks who don’t know, started on Scriptnotes as being a person who did outros and then became our editor. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to [email protected]. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. Megana, you saw that we now have hats? Megana: I have not seen the hats. John: My hat’s inside. I’ll show you the hat. Megana: I can’t wait. John: There’s even drinkware. No mugs. As you know, I am anti-mug, but we do have other drinkware. Megana: Sadly, you are anti-mug. John: I’m anti-mug. We can get into my anti-mug stance. That’s another episode. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on reunions. Drew and Megana, thank you so much. Megana: Thank you. Drew: Thanks, guys. [Bonus Segment] John: Megana, we are catching you just coming back from a reunion, a college reunion. Was it what you expected? Was it nice to see people? What is a reunion like in this time of Instagram where you could keep up with people you want to keep up with? Megana: That’s such a good question. I feel like the people that I end up keeping up with on Instagram are not necessarily the people I want to keep up with. John: If Megana follows you, she secretly hates you. Megana: No. I would just say that a lot of my friends who I was most excited to see do not post that regularly on Instagram. Maybe it’s the mystery that made me more excited to see them. But also, a lot of the friends that I wanted to see have had babies recently, and so they also have- John: Reasons why they’re busy. Megana: Yeah, their hands are full. John: I’m always a little suspicious of people who are not on Instagram. Megana: Are you? John: Weirdly, I am. I know people have their valid reasons. Maybe they get sucked in too much or they just don’t want people to know about their lives. But also, that’s how I would assume I’m gonna reach you is on Instagram. Drew: It’s like being in the phone book. Megana: That’s so interesting, because I recently got hacked, which is humiliating and embarrassing. But you knew that. John: I knew that. I think I was the person who- Megana: You were the person who told me I got hacked. John: I messaged you like, “Megana, there’s a problem here.” Megana: After that, I was so irritated with just the process of getting my account back under control that I was like, “I am gonna absolutely delete Instagram.” It’s interesting that you would’ve been suspicious of me had I done it. John: I’m nothing if not self-contradictory. Talk to us about this reunion. You go back. You see college friends. Megana: I went back, saw college friends, saw college friends’ families, held a lot of babies, which was nice and something that I enjoy doing. It’s just wonderful to see people become more themselves. I know college is such a special time where I think you are so free of obligations, but it’s just wonderful to have seen my friends develop in their careers and just how that manifests and how they carry themselves. I felt very proud in a dance mom sort of way. John: This is your first reunion being back since you moved to Hollywood, correct? Your previous reunions, you would’ve been still at Google, I’m guessing? Where does this find you? Megana: Yeah, which was a big change to explain to people that I don’t know all that well, but yeah. John: Nice. Now, Drew, it’s complicated to explain your schooling history. Drew: I’m weird, yeah. John: You’re weird, yeah. You did not go to a classic college situation, so you don’t have a college reunion in the same sense. Drew: We don’t. No. I went to conservatory in the UK, which I think most schools in the UK, I’m not sure if they do any reunions. I feel like that’s far too sentimental for them. No, so it’s just been keeping up on… Also, I have a tiny class. I’ve got like 20 kids basically. That’s probably not gonna happen. We have to figure out ways to do that ourselves. John: Have you been to high school reunions? Drew: I haven’t, because that also is a weird situation for me. I went to a little art school in the middle of the woods. Megana: I don’t think I realized that. Drew: I went to a place called Interlochen Arts Academy. John: I’ve heard of that, yeah. Drew: It’s great, but you have to take a lot of planes to get there, and a reunion’s not that easy. John: I’ve had both high school and college reunions, and I’ve found them both great. College reunions, it’s nice to be back in the campus space. It’s like, “Oh, Peggy’s bar is still there,” all the stuff. You recognize what’s there, what’s the same, what’s changed. Just that feeling of being back in that location takes you back in that time, which is really, really nice. You get to see friends, of course, and catch up, and people have gotten married and divorced and all the changes that happen. You see who aged well and who did not age well, which is always fun to see. But weirdly, high school reunions, I can chart more progress in the high school ones, because they’re the people who I didn’t want to see, who I did see at my 5-year and my 10-year. You’re still very competitive, who’s doing what, and people are showing off. At a certain point, people who’d left Boulder, where I grew up, were boomeranging back to Boulder. That I found really strange too. People who went to California, who went to New York, and suddenly they’re back in our comparatively small town. People who I never thought would come back were back. Getting to my 10-year and then my 20-year reunion, even the people who I didn’t especially like, I was happy for them. I was just happy to see people thriving a bit. Megana: That’s so interesting. I have so much affection for the people that I went to high school with. Most of them are still in Ohio. I’m actually in the process of making up for a high school reunion that was compromised by COVID, I guess. It’s interesting, because most of my peers and the other student counsel people still live in Ohio. I want one of them to just step up and take the reins, because they live close by and could easily organize it. John: Let’s paint the real picture here. Of course you were the student body president. Megana: Yes. John: As a student body president, it is this tradition where you are therefore responsible for putting together the reunions, which seems like a lot of pressure to put on a 17-year-old for future life decisions. Megana: It is a lot of responsibility. I would happily do it and just choose a bar for people to meet up at, but then when I start having this conversation, other people have really strong opinions. I’m curious to hear your take, because that last time that we started talking about this, the other class officer people were like, “Oh, we’ll do it at this fancy event place, and we’ll get alcohol, and we’ll charge this much for tickets.” I was like, “I certainly don’t want to organize that, but I also really don’t think that I would want to go to that.” Don’t you want your reunion to be a casual thing? What’s your guys’ take? John: I’m a little bit sympathetic to what they’re saying, because there’s a sense of providing a little bit of structure for it, makes it so it’s not just so casual that it’s just at a bar. My 10-year reunion was a little bit more structured in the sense of, it wasn’t just an RSVP. You did have to pay in advance so that they knew how many people to expect and they could actually plan stuff. The later ones were a little bit more ad hoc and thrown together and it was in a bar. But at that point, it was who was still in town and available. But my strong advice for you is just pick whoever has the strongest opinions and say, “I agree. You should be in charge.” Is that possible? Megana: I think that it could be. I think it’s probably my own guilt that is preventing me from doing that. But I think that that would probably be a happier solution all around. John: The local person should head it up, because it’s so hard. It’s easier now to do that remotely than it ever has been before, but still, they’re on the ground. Megana: I keep being like, “Oh, we should go to this bar in town,” and it’s like, nope, that bar closed. I just don’t know stuff like that anymore. John: Reunions are also a fascinating thing in movies. Obviously, The Big Chill, but there’s a lot of other of people getting together over time. It’s a question of do you show them in the original thing and then jump them forward or is it just them meeting now and having to catch up over what’s happened. I’m surprised there’s not been a Breakfast Club reunion movie, for example. That feels like a missed opportunity. Drew: That’d be cool. Megana: That is so interesting. I guess my cynical take is that not that much changed after that Saturday. John: Probably not, yeah. Drew: It’d also be fun to see them at a reunion with everyone else in the school and you’d be able to fill in all those other characters. John: We would do it. Obviously, all of our sequels tend to feel like reunions as it is. Bad Boys 4 is a reunion movie. There’s something nice about getting the gang back together for one more run. Megana: Whenever you do a sequel, you have to start the characters worse than you hope they have their happy ending, just so you can reset the conflict. It makes me a little sad to think about doing that to those kids. John: It’s fine. That’s what we go to movies for is seeing that. Megana: The Deadline article is coming out as we meet. John: It’s so good to have a little reunion of the three of us here. Megana, thanks for stopping by. Megana: Thank you. Links: Episode 44 – Endings for beginners Episode 170 – Lotteries, lightning strikes and twist endings Episode 366 – Tying Things Up Episode 392 – The Final Moment Episode 524 – The Home Stretch Too Many Cooks America’s best decade, according to data by Andrew Van Dam for The Washington Post All Fours by Miranda July Callipeg Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt! Check out the Inneresting Newsletter Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription! Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter John on Mastodon Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!) Segments originally produced by Stuart Friedel, Megan McDonnell and Megana Rao. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Email us at [email protected] You can download the episode here.The post Scriptnotes, Episode 647: Crafting Your Ending, Transcript first appeared on John August.

The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you are listening to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, agents and managers. How do you obtain them? How do you work with them? And if necessary, how do you fire them? To answer these questions, we will be traveling back all the way to the start of this podcast to search for the answers. That’s right, it is a compendium episode, where you’ll hear three segments with me and Craig back when we were much younger and still full of umbrage. Drew, tell us about the clips that you’ve picked and what we’re going to hear today. Drew Marquardt: We’re gonna start with Episode 2. John: Episode 2, god, yeah. Drew: At the very beginning. That’s how to get an agent or manager. No two writers get their reps the same way, but this is about finding how to get the right agent or manager to notice you. John: I feel this kind of PTSD from those very early episodes, because I was cutting them all myself in Garage Band. Now we have Matthew. But it was a very manual process for me. Drew: You guys sound so laid back in the early ones. John: It’s very nice. Now we’re just all stress. Drew: Then we’re going on to Episode 172, which is the perfect agent. Do you remember the Perfect series? We had all of that. The perfect agent, it’s now you have an agent and how does this work. How does this relationship work? What do you expect from your reps? How do you build and maintain that relationship? John: Great. For sure. Then our final segment? Drew: Is firing a manager. John: Which is one of Craig’s favorite topics. Drew: Craig’s favorite. He’s historically brought a lot of umbrage to this. I went all the way back to Episode 7 for this, because this is his first whack at the subject, and it’s his most balanced on it. It’s much more tact than umbrage. John: That’s great. We’ll listen to these three clips, and then we’ll be back here at the end for One Cool Things, boilerplate and all the other stuff. But do stick around if you’re a Premium Member, because I will be talking through my big change, which is for the first time in my whole career, I now have a manager. Just a couple weeks ago, I signed with a manager. I’ll talk about why and what that process was like hiring a manager and what’s been interesting and good and different about it. Drew: I’m excited to break it down with you. John: Cool. Let’s travel back into time, and we’ll see you there at the far side of these three great clips. [Episode 2 Clip] John: I think we should focus on something we do know a lot about. We’re going to rip off the band-aid this week and we’re going to talk about something that in six years of running the blog, I’ve never actually written a post about this because it’s just such a dreadful morass of something to talk about. Craig: It’s the worst, it’s the worst. John: It’s the worst, and at least 80 percent of the questions that come into the site are basically this question. You’re ready? I’m going to paraphrase the one question that I’ve heard my entire blogging career. Craig: Just do it, do it fast. John: “How do I get an agent and/or manager?” Craig: Oh, God. Now, let me just say, just so that anyone out there who is struggling to get an agent or manager doesn’t think that we are mocking your pain. John: No, not at all. Craig: We’re not. Really what we are embracing is the pain of the question itself because here’s what’s difficult, guys. If you really get down to what John and I know about getting an agent or a manager, what we know is how we got an agent in 1995. That’s what we specifically know. Some of the pain of this question is it’s like a 15-year-old boy coming to you and saying, “How do I lose my virginity?” I could tell you how I lost my virginity in 1986. I just don’t know if it’s going to be applicable to you. John: I think I do have a little bit more experience just because I’ve gone through generations of assistants who have become writers themselves and have gotten agents, so I’ve seen their process. Craig: Good point. John: Yeah. It’s not identical to what my process was and a crucial thing for framing this whole discussion is that there’s not one way it happens. Just like everyone does lose their virginity in a slightly different way, everyone gets to an agent or a manager in a slightly different way. We can only talk about general systems for success that people tend to find when they’re looking for agents and managers. I think we need to start by talking about what the hell an agent or a manager really is, because they’re used interchangeably and they’re actually different things. Craig: Very, very different, yes. There’s something called the Talent Representation Act or Talent Agency Act, I can’t remember quite the exact name, but it’s California state law. Basically, the law says if you want to represent artists of any kind as an agent and procure them employment – that’s the big one – you are regulated. You have to be licensed by the state, you cannot charge more than 10 percent of what they earn, and you also can’t own any of it. For screenwriters, what that translates into actually is that agents cannot produce your material, because producing is a kind of an investment in the material itself. That was the way it was for a long, long time. Then came the rise of managers who are not beholden to that law and they can, in fact, charge any percentage they want, and they can also produce your material. Technically, however, they are not allowed to procure you employment. John: Now, procure sounds like a very legal term. Obviously I know that there’s a lot of overlap between what an agent does and what a manager does, but what is the difference between procure? The manager is not allowed to say, “Pay us this amount of money.” Craig: The manager I do not believe is allowed to directly negotiate the terms of employment, I think. I’ll have to check on that one. By the way, as a general note, if there’s anything like this where I’m not quite sure, I can always lob a clarification on your blog when you put up the link. I know for sure that managers legally can’t seek employment. In other words, they can’t field requests for employment. They certainly can’t call up and say, “My client is available. Do you have anything that they might be interested in?” Essentially, the manager is supposed to manage. Again, this is all the technical side of it and then there’s the real side. Managers are supposed to handle your day-to-day life. They help you develop material if that’s the way you want to use them. They help take care of your day-to-day needs when you’re working on a project. Let’s say you’re out of town working on something and they help facilitate your life. They’re not supposed to actually go out and get you a job. John: Right. Now, it’s not an either/or situation. Many writers will find they have both a manager and an agent, and in many cases they’ll have a manager a year before they have an agent. It feels like there are many more managers in the business and that they’re easier to gain access to than an agent. Craig: I agree. John: Agents tend to be gathered together in very big, powerful agencies. There are certainly smaller boutique agencies that represent writers. Managers tend to be in smaller shops where they’re representing a smaller group of writers, or directors or other talented people and focusing on them. Managers, in general, might read every draft, and an agent very likely would not read every draft. A manager might give you notes. An agent would be much less likely to give you notes. I approach the conversation with a dim view of managers, and this is just my generational bias. I’ve been called out for my generational bias because when I started in this business, the writers who had managers weren’t getting a lot out of their managers and they were just looking for the excuse to fire their managers. Now, more writers who are working regularly are talking about having success with their managers and keeping their managers as an active part of their career even after they’ve had a few features produced. Craig: Yeah, I’m with you in the generational bias. I’m somewhat suspicious of managers. I had a manager for a long time, and in many ways it was a good thing, and in a number of ways it wasn’t, and it didn’t end particularly well. I think that there are basically three reasons that writers gravitate toward… I’m going to give myself a fourth reason. One is, as you pointed out, sometimes they’re the easier representation to get, just to start with. Two, managers are much more willing to help you develop your material. If you’re the kind of writer who actually wants to bounce material off of somebody who isn’t a writer or a producer, a manager can help with that. Three, I think some writers feel, “Look, I can’t have two agents at once. I can’t be represented by CAA and UTA, but I can be represented by CAA and Three Arts. That’s twice the bang for the buck.” I wish I could remember what the fourth one was, but that was probably the most important one of all. John: Those are three good points. To bounce off your third point there, being represented by two different people gets you exposure to more people who you could potentially be working with. And so even though the managers aren’t supposed to be out there giving you employment, they may be sending you out to meet with somebody, and that someone they have you meet with ends up becoming an important link for future employment. Craig: Yeah, that’s absolutely true. I don’t have a huge problem with… If you love your manager, awesome. New writers who are seeking desperately for representation, and understandably so, I think can actually benefit a lot from a manager. But just be aware – this is the great currency problem – when you are a new writer without a track record and limited earning potential, you’re going to get a certain kind of manager. As your career advances, you owe it to yourself to fairly evaluate whether or not your manager is appropriate for where you are in your career if you advance. John: Yeah. Let’s start the next part about what is an agent or a manager actually looking for. Let’s stop looking at it from the writer’s point of view. I need someone to represent me, to take me in and introduce me to all the right people and get me jobs. What does an agent want? Craig: They want to make money. Bottom line. John: They’re there to make money for themselves, for their agency. They’re there to try to get their clients hired and working continuously in the business. From that perspective, if they’re looking at a range of possible writers who they could represent, they’re going to look for the ones they believe are talented, the ones they believe will work really hard, the ones who can actually land the job – which means going in there to the meetings, for the nine meetings, and convincing a bunch of people that they are the right person to be hired for the job – the ones who are going to deliver. If an agent has a client that can land a job but then won’t actually turn in the script or finish the script or will turn in a really substandard version of what the script should be, that’s going to hurt. The agent has a limitation of time. The agent can only represent so many clients. There’s only so many hours in the day. They can only put up so many clients for jobs. Taking on a new person is bringing a new person into the fold, someone they have to introduce to everybody, someone who they have to try to keep employed, someone they have to be talking on the phone all the time and trying to get them hired. Craig: Also, just as an extension of that too, when an agent takes on a client that client is an extension of their reputation. I’m vouching that if I’m an agent I have a brand just the way that you and I have a brand. We’re known for writing certain kinds of things. Agents are known for representing certain kinds of people. They take on the wrong person and that person craps out, that’s an uncomfortable phone call for that agent. That damages their standing and that’s going to hurt them. There’s a ripple effect. When writers approach getting an agent and they look at this incredibly steep wall and the barrier to entry and they go, “Why? Why is this so hard to do?” It’s because of that. John: Yeah. It’s important to remember that screenwriting is about pushing those words around on the paper and it’s being able to write a really good script. Screenwriting, the career of screenwriting, is also the ability to land a job and to get paid for what you are doing. An agent is excited to read a really good script. They’re not going to sign a writer, in general, without sitting in a room with that writer and making the judgment call, could I send this person out on a job and get them hired to do something? They are measuring the social skills of a person who they are going to be possibly be representing. Craig: Yeah. That’s right. You can definitely be a complete weirdo if you are just killing it on the page. If you are what I would consider a conventional screenwriter writing conventional material and you’re just a zero in the room, it’s going to be tough. I have to say that part of the business is unfair, but it’s real. We can’t deny the fact that part of what we’re offering the people who hire us is a sense of comfort that we’re going to deliver and everything’s going to be okay. They’re just as scared as we are. Everybody’s scared. John: It’s very much a business of trust. As the person hiring you, I am trusting that you will actually be able to deliver me this script. I base that trust on the things I’ve read on the paper but also looking you in the eye and seeing, “Okay, he gets it. He gets what it is we’re trying to do here.” Yes, it’s incredibly important when you’re talking to the writer you’re bringing in for a million dollars to finish the script that’s about to go into production, but it’s also important just the scale job that you’re trying to get made. Every step for one of those executives is important. Craig: All right. Then here’s the big question as we hit the midpoint of our podcast. Everybody’s been really patient. They’ve listened to us talk about uteruses and the law. John, how do these people get a manager or an agent? We ripped the band-aid off that 15 minutes ago. We’re still dancing around it, aren’t we? John: I think you get an agent or manager through… I can think of three ways. The first is a recommendation. Someone has read your work, has met you, and said, “This guy is awesome. This guy should be writing movies for Hollywood. I’m going to take this script and I’m going to take you, introduce you to this agent or manager, and say you should represent this person because this person is great.” If that person has the ear of the right agent or manager and there’s already trust and taste being established between them, that agent or manager will read your material, say yes or no, and be interested and excited about possibly representing you. That’s how I got my agent is a friend took the script I had written to his boss. He was interning at a small production company. The boss liked it, wanted to take it to the studio. I said, “I really need an agent. Can you help me get an agent?” He said yes and he took it to an agent he had a relationship with. The agent read it, because this guy who he trusted said that it was worth his time reading. He took it, read it, he met with me, and he signed me. That’s a very, very common story for how writers get represented. Second way I would say is agents read material that they found through some sort of pre-filtering mechanism. A pre-filtering mechanism could be a really good graduate school program. If you graduated from a top film school and you were the star screenwriter of a USC graduate film school program, some junior agent at an agency is likely reading those scripts and saying, “Oh, this is actually a really good writer. This is a person we should consider.” Even without that writer hunting down that agent, the agent was looking for who are the best writers coming out of these programs or the best writers coming out of a competition. These are the Nicholl’s finalists. Those scripts get read and those people will be having meetings with the people who think that they are potentially really good clients. Craig: Makes sense. What’s the third one? John: Just scouring the world to find interesting voices. I don’t know how much of this story is really accurate, but the apocryphal story of Diablo Cody is here’s a young woman who’s writing a funny blog. An agent reads the blog and says, “This woman can really, really write. She’s funny. She has a voice. I bet she could become a screenwriter.” I don’t think all those details are quite accurate, but there’s always those writers who, they were doing standup and they’re clearly very funny and someone sees their act and says, “I think that person is a performer, but I also think that person is a writer and there’s something there that’s worth pursuing.” Craig: I like those. Of course, all of them are predicated on you being a good writer and writing a good script, as is always the case, but those all make sense. I actually asked an agent at CAA named Bill Zotti. I gave him a call earlier today and I asked him the question. Of course, he groaned, because it’s that question, but he had a couple of pieces of really good advice that I figured I should pass along. One is to make sure that if you are specifically pursuing an agent, to really know who they represent and ask, is this agent appropriate for my material. He said one of the most frustrating things is when he’ll get query letters or log lines for the kind of movies that his clients just don’t write. Right now there are a lot of resources out there that are relatively inexpensive, like IMDb Pro for instance, where you can actually see… Let’s say I write movies like Judd Apatow. “Who represents Judd Apatow? Let me see.” I write movies like John August. “Who represents John August? Let me see.” Okay. If I send that person a query letter and say, “Listen, I’m a huge fan of John August. I’m aspiring to write like John August. Here’s my log line,” you might have a shot. Whereas if you send it to a guy that represents writers who write rated-R broad comedies, that person’s going to go, “What do I care? It’s not for me.” Do your homework. If you’re going to go through the effort of trying to break the rocks to get a rep, do your homework about the rep. The other advice that he gave that I thought was pretty smart was to get a job in the business, which seems so blindingly obvious, but yet so many people resist it. I know why, because it’s hard and it involves a commitment that you may not be willing to make. He said, “Listen, 80 percent of the people in the mail room at one of the big talent agencies are not really interested in being agents.” They’re there to learn the business because they want to do other things. They want to produce. They want to write. They want to direct. When you work in that business and you work in that place, you get to know the other people there. You work next to a guy who suddenly is now an assistant to an agent. You say to him, “Listen, I’ve written a script, and I’m going to tell you what the idea is.” If he loves it, he’s got a chance now to impress his boss with a great piece of material, so he’s going to read it. These personal connections are invaluable. It’s nearly impossible to do that kind of thing from Rhode Island. John: Yeah. I would also say what your example stresses is the horizontal networking. Everyone always thinks that to become successful you have to meet more powerful people and get more powerful people to love you. It’s really not that case at all. It’s been my experience, but it’s also been the experience of all my assistants, the way they got to their next step was by helping out everyone else at their same level. They were reading other people’s scripts and giving them notes. Those same friends were reading their scripts. Eventually, they wrote that thing that was, “You know what? This is really good. This is the script I’ve been waiting for you to write, and I think I know the right person to take this to.” It’s always been those people who were doing exactly the same stuff you were doing who were the next step. Craig: That’s right. That’s exactly right. I think people should think, as they are horizontally networking, about how to market themselves, because the funny thing is Hollywood with one hand is saying, “Get out, stay out,” and with the other hand is saying, “Please, somebody show up,” because they’re hungry for new talent. They’re desperate for new talent. Nothing makes them happier than a writer that’s better than a guy who makes a million dollars that they don’t have to pay a million dollars to. They’re actually looking, believe it or not. If you can market yourself properly… For instance, we have a couple of friends who wrote a pretty crazy script and just put it out on the internet and marketed it as this insane thing, and it caught on. John: You’re talking about the Robotard 8000? Craig: I’m talking about the Robotard 8000. You may say, “Why would you put your screenplay on the internet, and why would you say it was authored by the Robotard 8000?” Why? Because they have agents at CAA and they’re working. It really got them a lot of attention. Also, it didn’t hurt that other writers that people trusted were saying, “We read this script. This was really funny.” Similarly, I’ll tell you, if I were 22 again and I were in a writer’s group, I would say – and you and I didn’t have this in the 90s – “Let’s get a web page for our writer’s group, and let’s just start blogging about the experience of our writers group. Let’s track the progress of our scripts and the log lines and the rest of it.” If one of us catches somebody’s attention, suddenly our writer’s group has a little bit of buzz to it. “What will this writer’s group come up with next?” That’s why that Fempire thing was so cool, with Diablo- John: Dana and Lorene. Craig: … and Dana and Lorene. It was like, okay, there’s a group. Now, it’s not really a group. They all have to write their own scripts. But something about it, there’s a little bit of sparkly dust to it. It’s interesting. How do you make yourself interesting? Maybe then somebody will be attracted to your script. John: We talked about marketing, but it’s really almost positioning. People need to know how to consider you or what to consider you as. Here’s a terrible way to go into your first meeting. You wrote a really good comedy script that people like, and so they brought you in. A manager and agent sat down to meet with you. They say, “I really liked your script. It was really funny. What do you want to write?” It’s like, “I mostly want to write period detective stories with monsters.” The manager is going to hem and haw and make conversation for about another 10 minutes, but they’re not going to want to sign you, because they were thinking about you as a comedy person. Let them pigeonhole you for five minutes until you can actually get something going. They need to know how are they going to make the next phone call to somebody else, saying, “This guy has a really funny comedy script, but he’s exactly the right person to hire for your period action movie.” That just doesn’t make sense. Craig: It doesn’t. Listen, these guys, what is their training in? Managers and agents are not there to tell you what to be. Their expertise is watching trends and patterns and pulling people out that fit what they believe is going to generate cash. They can’t tell you who to be. What they can do is see who you are and say, “That looks like money.” So know who you are. Go in there and be who you are. It doesn’t mean that you have to go in there as Michael Bay. Not everybody has to make $200 million movies. Not everybody has to sell $3 million scripts. To be successful in this business, you just have to work. If I could walk into an agent’s office and say, “I will never make more than $200,000 a year, but I will make $200,000 every year for the next 20 years and I won’t bother you a lot,” that’s an instant signing. Why not? That’s great. It’s not about how much you’re going to do, but just will you do. If you walk into an office and you say, “Look. I wrote this script and this is how I want to come off. These are the movies I love. This is the niche I want to fill,” if they feel like that’s a real niche and that niche needs filling, that’s a big deal. But they can’t tell you who to be. John: Exactly. You have to be able to come to them with material that shows what your talent is, and a story, or at least a way of presenting yourself that leads them to believe, “Yeah, I see what he’s going for and I think he or she can achieve that.” Craig: People have to understand that agents and managers – let’s call them representation – they’re never going to be your mommy or your daddy. They’re not your savior. They’re not Superman. What they are, essentially, are the vanguard of the endless decision process that leads to a writer being hired. They’re the first people in line to say, “OK, I’m willing to take a shot on you.” You still haven’t made a dollar when you get an agent. But it all is driven by you. John: I always get the question of, how do I get an agent or manager? Generally, it’s the person who’s like, “I just finished my first script. How do I get an agent or manager?” That’s like, okay, you wrote a script. That’s great. After your second script, then I’ll believe you actually can write a second script. Or they’re like, “We just started working on our first script. How do we get a manager?” It’s acknowledging that part of the process is the ability to prove that you can actually do this repeatedly. A thing I think we’ll probably say endlessly in the series of this podcast is that the career of being a screenwriter is not about one script. It’s about being able to write 50 scripts. While there may be one script that really gets representation’s attention, they’re really signing you for the next 30 things you’re going to write. They would love to be able to sell this one script. They mostly want to be able to sell you every year to different clients, to different producers, different studios, to continue generating cash flow and continue making movies. Craig: Yeah, there’s a certain naiveté about the question in and of itself. Again, why we hate the question is just that some people are asking it and they haven’t quite earned it yet. “How do I get an agent or a manager?” Maybe the better way to phrase it is, “Which agent or manager should get me?” Start thinking that way. Then if you think that way, you realize, “I’d better have something worth getting. I’d better know who these people are. I’d better know what I want and where I want to work and what kind of movies I want to be known for.” It’s the American Idol syndrome. “I go on TV, they like me, they pick me, I’m a star.” John: The lottery mentality, which kills me about screenwriting, is that, by writing this one script, I will sell it for X dollars and then I will be set and everything will be wonderful and happy for here on out. It rarely happens that way. I really liked the way you rephrased it, and I’m going to rephrase it again slightly, is, “How will the right agent find me?” If you can think about it in that perspective, a lot of things become more clear. How do I make myself visible enough that the right agent will recognize my talent and my determination and say, “This is the client I have to represent.” What you may discover in that process is that – I say “the right agent find me” – the right agent probably isn’t the superpower agent who has Judd Apatow. It’s more likely the guy who has just a couple of clients, but they’re really good clients. I left a bigger agent and went to a smaller agent right before Go. I made the change because I needed somebody who was generationally closer to me, who was hungry in the same ways that I was hungry, and I could grow with. I get frustrated when people aim too high, too fast. You want the person who can grow with you, ideally. Craig: So true. The only thing worse than not having an agent is having the wrong agent, because then you feel like you are represented and everything’s going to be fine, but it’s a mismatch, so you have all of the lack of benefit of no agent, but none of the drive to get a new one, because you think you have one. That’s the worst situation. I don’t care about the size of your agent, how big they are, who their clients are. If you’re just starting out and you’re lucky enough to attract the eye of a very powerful agent, you should ask, because it’s going to happen anyway, that they assign a junior agent as well to you, because you’re going to need more help, and you’re going to need more attention. They’re going to be busy talking to people that earn $20 million a year. They have directors and actors who out-earn every screenwriter. They just won’t talk to you. Get the right guy or girl. John: And if you get the wrong guy, you can tune into a later podcast in which Craig will tell you how to fire your agent or manager. Craig: It’s the best. John: It’s actually one of Craig’s specialties. It’s one of the things I think he’s best known for, is really how to sever ties and move on with grace. I’ve seen him do it for many, many other screenwriters. It’s a master class. Craig: I’m the Kevorkian of talent representation. [Episode 172 Clip] John: Last week we talked about the perfect studio executive. This week let’s talk about the perfect agent and what makes the perfect agent, what that person should be doing for a screenwriter, what our expectations should be when we’re talking to an agent. Craig, get us started. Craig: I think that we do have quite a few agents and agent assistants who will soon be agents listening to us, so hey, lean in, listen carefully. I’m very simple about what I look for in an agent. Primarily, let’s talk about the real simple stuff. Call us back. John: Always good. Craig: Call us back. Don’t be impossible to reach. Call us back within a reasonable amount of time. That’s the big one. John: Let’s define reasonable amount of time. A reasonable amount of time is 24 hours at the outlier, and if it’s not 24 hours, then it’s some communication that acknowledges, “Got your message, I will get back to you ASAP.” Craig: Yeah. My feeling is if I call before lunch, I get a call before the end of the day. If I call after lunch, I should still get a call by the end of the day, but if not, first thing the next day and an acknowledgment that the call was received. That’s a real simple thing. I know that this is something that is talked about a lot in the agency hallways as a kind of nuts and bolts things. I cannot stress how important it is. Ultimately, the constancy of communication is the glue of the agent-client relationship. It’s as simple as that. The other thing I look for in an agent is clarity. When a writer asks an agent, “What should I do? Should I do this job or this job? Should I pass on this? Should I accept it? Who should we give this to? Is this the right producer?” what we want desperately is the same thing that the people that hire us want: clarity and comfort. We want our agent to give us an answer. If there is no answer, then explain why there’s no answer, and then explain that either way will be okay. But this wishy-washiness or asking questions back – we’re not looking for an Ericksonian therapist to just rephrase our questions. We want answers. John: When you proposed this topic, I went through and sort of made my list of archetypes of sort of the things I think about when I think of an agent. And not all agents are going to be all these people, but generally these are the kind of roles an agent fulfills in a writer’s life. One is as adviser, which is just what you described, is the person who has an informed opinion about what should be done on a project, in a situation, what is the overall shape of what this experience should be. Secondly is as kan advocate. You want your agent to be someone who is like on your side. And so when people are pushing you around, they’re pushing back. And that’s a really crucial role because sometimes the agent has to be the bad guy. The agent has to say, “No, he delivered. Pay him.” And convince on the next step if you want the next step. That’s a critical function of an agent and sometimes one that they are reluctant to perform because they’re trying to maintain all these other relationships. But from the writer’s perspective, we just need you to stick up for us. Third archetype is sort of the connector. And really good agents are smart at being able to put people together who they think can work well together. That’s putting writers in rooms with studio executives who actually know what they’re doing, setting up a lunch between a writer and a director because there’s probably something they could work on together, bringing the right material to the writer, because this is a book we have and we think you would probably like it. That’s a crucial function of a good agent. Craig: Let’s stop there on that one, because a lot of these things are sort of constitutionally required for agents. Some of them are things that agents have to earn their way towards. The truth is that we want from our agents a certain amount of connectivity. And there are all sorts of words for this, juice, or whatever you want to call it. We want our agent to be able to get the people we need to get on the phone on the phone. And if you can’t get those people on the phone, then you need to have a relationship with a senior agent who can. John: That’s a crucial point, because a lot of times as newer writers, you’re going to be working with a junior agent, someone who doesn’t have all the history and all of the contacts and all the access that the top people have. But in some cases, those younger agents have tremendous numbers of contacts, they’re just at a lower level. And those can be incredibly valuable, and they can actually be faster than some of the very top-tier people can actually get that information. That can be really useful. Obviously, if your agent is plugged in at CAA and they have this vast knowledge network of how everything is set up, that’s awesome. But even if your agent is at a smaller sort of boutique agency that deals with just TV writers, that can be exactly perfect if that’s what you’re trying to do. My first agent was just a terrific agent, but his client list was mostly very esoteric indie writer-directors. He was really good at dealing with sort of specialty film arms of things, but that wasn’t who I ultimately was. And it got to be very frustrating, because he didn’t know the people who I needed to be in rooms with. And that’s why it didn’t last. Craig: Exactly right. There’s another thing that I think the perfect agent is capable of doing, and that is switching their tone from every kind of communication they have, except for their communication with their writer clients, and the communication with the writer clients. We know when we’re being agented. So, what is being agented? It’s being handled, cajoled. There’s that agent talk that’s smooth and fast and all facts have suddenly become fogged by war. And everything gets twisted around. That’s what they do. And they need to be able to do that. When they’re dealing with other agents, when they’re dealing with producers, when they’re dealing with studios, when they’re dealing with business affairs, they need to agent people. That’s their job. But when you’re talking to us, before you get on the phone with us, take a breath and say this: “This person I don’t agent. This is my client. This person I can just calm down, relax, and be honest with.” I know. Sounds crazy. But we actually appreciate honesty more than anything. Don’t hide bad news from us. Don’t sugarcoat bad news. Don’t flimflam us. And if we challenge you on something and we’re right, don’t think that by saying, “You know what, that’s a really good point, you’re right,” that it makes you weak. It doesn’t. It makes us like you more. Save a certain tiny nugget of honest, normal you for us, and agent everybody else. John: Part of that honesty is being honest about why a project is coming to you or why a project is not coming to you. And that’s a very difficult conversation to have. Craig, you will be able to better articulate what the legal definitions and differences are between an agent and a manager. But my perception is that any time somebody comes to my agent with, “Here’s work. Here is work we would like John to do,” I think he’s legally obligated to tell me about it. Is that correct? Craig: It is. Yeah. A lot of times they will glide over that, because they know that you’re busy and unavailable and wouldn’t want to do that. I don’t need my agent to call me up and say, “Hey, listen, we got an offer. You just started writing a script. We got an offer for you to do an episode of an animated program in Albania.” I don’t need to hear about it. John: Yet I think one of the crucial things is – and this is the conversation I have quite often – in one of those sort of check-in calls, there will be like four things we’ll talk about, and the last thing will be, “Oh, and I got this thing for you. Here’s the project. Here’s the producer. Here’s why I think it’s a pass.” And that is just a godsend when you hear what that is. Agents are fairly describing what it actually is and why it’s probably not interesting. And sometimes I’ll say like, “Actually, that does sound really interesting,” or like, “I’ve always liked that person, so I do want to take a look at it.” But a good agent is able to say, “This is why it’s probably not going to be right.” In some cases, especially for a newer writer, they might say, “Okay, there’s this project over at this studio and they’re meeting with writers. They asked about you. I think it’s a fishing trip. I think they’re just basically bringing a bunch of people into the room and seeing what might stick. And you could be wasting a tremendous amount of your time.” I so appreciate that. And as a young writer, I might be panicked, like, “Wait, I’m not going to go for this job?” A smart agent might say, “You know what? I don’t think anyone is ever going to get that job. I think it’s basically just a let’s see what sticks kind of situation.” Craig: Yeah. For sure. There’s another nice benefit to letting your clients know when you’re passing on things for them, in that it makes them feel good, that people want you to work for them. Look, if you say don’t do something, we’re not doing it. We’re very simple that way. We want to do everything. We want you guys to be able to help us say no to things. It’s obviously a very valuable part of this. Sometimes as agents, you will smell some blood in the water and we won’t smell the same blood. I’ll get a call, “Something came up at the agency. Our biggest movie star is excited about doing this thing. It’s a book. And everybody is running around like crazy. But I put your name in and they really responded to that. This could be huge.” Look, again, we’re being agented there a little bit. John: Yeah. But at least you’re being candid about what’s actually happening there. Craig: Right. Exactly. And it’s good to know. And then if we don’t smell the same blood and we go, “You know what, I get why they would love that. I just don’t think it’s for me,” then you let it go. That’s okay. Just don’t jam us in, because we’re not dumb, we know how the agent business works. You guys make 10 percent of what we make. The person who makes the most amount of money, that’s the most important person. We know that. And it’s okay to shepherd us all together. That’s part of your job. But then if we don’t get it and we don’t want to do it, just be respectful and let us not like it. That’s okay. John: That shepherd function is really crucial too. When Aline was on the show last, she talked about how her agent of many, many years, they were on a phone call and Aline was venting her frustration about this project and these people and the people being impossible. And the agent basically pulled her aside and said, like, “Get over yourself. Call me back tomorrow. And figure out how you’re going to actually do this project, because you’re being crazy.” And that’s a crucial thing. That shepherding role of saying like, “You know what, you’re not actually being reasonable here.” It’s almost like a parent. Like, you know, reminding you, “You know what, this is your job. Your job is to write this movie. Write this movie. Get it over with. Get it done. And move on.” And that’s a crucial thing to have happen too. Sometimes you as the writer are the problem, and a very good agent can find the right way to tell you, “This is a you thing. Get through it. And let’s get onto your next project.” Craig: No question. Yeah, Aline and I actually have the same agent, and I can hear him saying all that. And frankly, we want that specificity. It goes back that we want to be spoken to honestly and we want clarity. If the clarity is you’re being insane, if my agent ever said to me, “You’re being insane,” I would think I’m being insane. A good agent should not be afraid of his client or her client. If you’re an agent and you’re worried that your client is not going to respond well to the truth, so your job is to somehow figure out how to hide the truth in a thing, like the way that I feed medicine to my dog by putting it in pudding, we’re going to know. Don’t be afraid of your clients. If your client can’t handle what’s true, then they’re not going to be able to handle it with their next agent or their agent after that. Truth is a great defense. John: I absolutely agree. The last thing I would say about the great agent is, the analogy I think I’ve often made is that if you’re having heart surgery, you don’t want to go to the woman who only performs heart surgery three times a year. You want to go to the surgeon and she performs it seven times a week. You want the person who is the pro at doing this thing. And sometimes as a writer you have to step back and realize, like, “Oh, you know what? You actually do this job. You’re actually the person who makes this deal. I’m not going to sort of worry about every little step of this process. I’m going to let you and maybe my lawyer go off, make this deal, figure out all that stuff, and then report back to me what the results are. And I can say yes or no.” But I see sometimes, especially newer writers, freak out about each little bit of a deal, and that’s not generally a helpful thing. Craig: It isn’t. I totally agree. There are times when we have a disagreement. And what I end up saying is, “Listen, let me tell you why I don’t want what they’ve offered, even though you think it’s good, because of this and this. It’s important to me. It’s important enough that I’m willing to say, no, I don’t want to do this.” And a good agent hears that and goes, “Fantastic news.” As long as you’re in sync with your client and they’re saying, “I don’t want to do it. I would rather not do it than this,” that’s empowering, and don’t fight anymore. Now just go with that, unless you feel that they’re being insane. Then tell them they’re insane. There needs to be that just honest communication. The most important advice I can give to you on your path to becoming a perfect agent is to not agent your client. John: I think that’s great advice. [Episode 7 Clip] John: Question for you. When you get an email from somebody you don’t know, do you google them? Craig: It depends on the content of the email. But if it intrigues me in any way, yes. John: The reason I ask is because I wanted to start today with a question, and it’s clearly a genuine question. This person put in enough work to the question that I don’t think that this was any sort of scam deal or anything. But as I looked up this person’s name – I didn’t recognize it, so I googled it – it came up as an adult film star. Craig: Oh, cool. John: I don’t think it’s actually the adult film star who was emailing me. But it’s a person who, because of the nature of the question, chose to use a handle, which was the adult film star thing, so that I wouldn’t actually print it. But of course, it was a female adult film star, which I would have no idea if it was actually a female. Craig: If you said the name, I would pretend that I didn’t know it. John: Oh, very nice. That’s the lovely thing about an audio podcast is no one can see your facial reaction. I’m going to choose to name this person Tina, which is not the name that originally came on the email. Let me read it to you: “About a year ago, a manager from a reputable company contacted me because they were a fan of my online videos,” which I presume were not adult videos. “I agreed to work with them. Unfortunately, this manager also represents people with lots of IMDb credits – big people, mostly actors though, a few writers. Over the last year it has become painfully obvious they have zero time for me and have put zero effort into helping my career get off the ground. “Any general meeting I’ve gotten over the last year has been a direct result of my own efforts. I am beginning to realize that this manager and I don’t agree on anything creatively. Their notes are contradictory and vague. When they’re not, I find them to be flat out wrong. “My question is, if I cut ties, I’m back to square one with no other representation possibilities on the horizon. At the same time, this manager has made it clear I’m last on their list of priorities. Even if I weren’t, the difference of opinion on everything seems counter-productive. Is it worth just keeping the manager or risk going it alone? “I’ve actually spoken to my manager about this. I asked him if he had the time for me. He said if I didn’t, they could maybe pass me along to someone a little lower at their company who may be able to champion me a bit more.” It’s a confusing note. I think it’s actually the writer saying that, so the writer suggesting that. “They said, ‘No, no. I have the time. Don’t worry.’ Well, I’m worried.” Craig: This is, talk about a softball question. 90 percent of the question is really an explanation of how poor of a job this manger is doing and how bad of a fit they are, and then 10 percent is generalized anxiety disorder. The answer is cut ties, of course. John: I may disagree with you on this. Craig: Let’s go. Let’s do this. John: I don’t want to be the serial monogamist of these relationships, but I feel like it may be a situation where she needs to find the next manager before she leaves this current manager. I don’t know that being free and clear and floating in the Hollywood ether is going to help her any more than being with a manager who, while not helping her, isn’t an anchor in any way to her. Craig: Well, here’s where I would disagree. It is difficult to switch representation without actively trying to do it. That is to say, without actively trying to get a new representative. It’s a very small community. As bad as a manager may be at their job, every manager seems to be amazing at sniffing out when their clients are trying to leave them. It becomes difficult to do a full-court press on your own behalf. If there is any opportunity that this writer has to find a better manager, that opportunity doesn’t disappear simply because they don’t have this person. This person’s literally a zero. That’s what the question stipulates. In my mind, I think by cutting ties you give yourself every opportunity to get out there, do a full-court press and not run into anybody that said, “Oh, I would, but your manager is a friend of mine,” or, “We share a client,” or, “I don’t want to poach.” Just get rid of him. I don’t know, that’s my feeling. John: Devil’s advocate, I will say that there’s other people who this writer could be bringing into his or her team who may be helpful, and the manager could actually be an asset getting them to it. I feel like you maybe go to your manager and say, “Hey, look, I really want to try to find an attorney. Can you give me some suggestions of people I can meet with who are good attorneys?” It could help open the doors to some of those things which aren’t a huge burden on the manager’s time. Then you have a pretty good attorney. And then when it’s time to leave this manager, you have a pretty good attorney who can help make the next set of connections. Craig: But it’s difficult to get an attorney if you’re showing up with no opportunity for lawyering. John: That’s true. You’re not going to get a lawyer unless there’s actually some contract to negotiate. Craig: Right, and that seems to be precluded by this relationship. I don’t know, I guess the underlying sentiment behind my advice here is that we as writers tend to project an enormous amount of power onto these representatives, fueled by our own anxiety that we will never love again. But the truth is you’re not being loved now. It’s a bad marriage, get out of the bad marriage. Look actively and wholeheartedly for a new marriage. You found this person. You’ll find another one. I also feel like a bad manager is worse than no manager, because while you have your bad manager, you’re hamstrung and you can’t do better. John: Craig, you are going to leave this manager. You’re going to advise Tina that she should leave this manager. What does Tina say to this manager? Craig: Really simple. You call the manager up, no need to make a big production out of it. You lead by saying, “Listen, I made a decision to let you go. I’m going to end our professional relationship.” You start with that, right off the bat, really dispassionate. Just say, “Unfortunately, things haven’t quite worked out the way I would’ve hoped. I had a certain series of goals for the two of us. They haven’t quite gelled, I’m sure you would agree. We’ve been together for X amount of time. It hasn’t resulted in employment. And frankly, it just doesn’t seem like you have the time for me or the attention that I would’ve hoped. The decision is final, but I do appreciate the fact that you took a shot with me to begin with. I wish you nothing but the best, and I hope you understand.” John: That sounds reasonable and mature and grown up. I will say that when I left my first agent, I didn’t have that level of sophistication. I felt the need to actually pick a fight and be able to have the reason for why I was leaving. He was genuinely a friend. He was just simply the wrong agent for me to be with, and so I felt the need to pick some sort of fight that he wasn’t doing a good job with me, so he would get angry with me, and therefore I’d angry with him and say, “I think I need to go find another agents.” The whole time, I had actually already started the whole process of figuring out who I was going to meet with next. Craig: Right, that works. Look, the most important thing is that whatever method you employ, you employ it post-facto to the decision. You don’t use this breakup speech to build up to the decision. You lead with it. The decision should be unilateral. It should be a fait accompli, and then you roll out your dismissal plan. John: What I just realized is that I led this conversation with talking about googling people, and I just googled my old agent yesterday, because I was curious. Someone said, “Whatever happened to him?” And I didn’t know what happened to him, and he’s fallen off the radar. Craig: You mean the Google radar? John: He doesn’t seem to exist in the last several years. Craig: Is it possible that he never existed and this is like a Beautiful Mind thing? John: That would be kind of amazing if he never existed. You go back through all those old contracts and those phone calls, and you see the other side of it, and I’m just talking to myself. I basically rented this empty office, and I would go there. Craig: This is the moment where Agent Kujan drops his coffee mug on the floor. [End of Clips] John: We are now back here in 2024, or whenever you’re listening to this podcast. It could be 2054 by the time you’re listening to it. My One Cool Thing is also time-travelly. This is the 25th anniversary of Go this year. GQ magazine had a great oral history retrospective of the making of Go. I was interviewed, along with Doug Liman, the director, Sarah Polley, many of the other actors. Desmond Askew I’ve not seen since we actually shot the movie. It was great to get this retrospective on how we got the movie made, how it almost didn’t get made. Paul Schrodt did a great job putting together this oral history. Drew: I loved hearing from William Fichtner. I know he’s in that movie, but he just seemed to have such love for it and such passion for it, even though he’s in it. John: I was genuinely surprised, because I would say during production, he was just always annoyed by me. At least that was my perception, because it was a really chaotic production. If you read the piece, you’ll see that it was a chaotic production. I was always meddling with things, but I needed to meddle with things, because Doug always had the camera on his back. Conversations that would’ve happened over in video village had to be right in front of the actors, because Doug had the camera on his shoulder. Drew: He was rigging a light on Breckin Meyer. John: Yeah. But I’m glad he had a great time it. Actually, it was a very difficult shoot but a really fun shoot. It really captured the joy of making and putting that movie out there in the world. Drew: Cool. John: Cool. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that. That is our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. Drew, thank you so much. Edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by James Llonch. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to [email protected]. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, 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. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on my signing with a manager. Now, Drew, before we go though, quite crucially, I wanted to talk about a traumatic experience you had this week and maybe talk through this a little bit. As everyone knows, we are a Highland house. All of our writing is done in Highland, which is the app that we make, and it’s what screenwriters should be using. But you this week, for a different project or something that’s going on, you had to use Final Draft. Tell us about Final Draft. Drew: You don’t pay me enough. You don’t realize how good you have it until you go back to Final Draft, because god, what a nightmare. John: You were discussing just putting in a parenthetical was… Drew: Yeah. In Highland, all you have to do is type a parenthetical and it automatically formats. In Final Draft, you have to hit tab twice. If dialogue gets caught in an action line, you’re screwed. You have to retype all that. John: It’s a really different thing. I’m sure if I had to do it, the muscle memory would come back, but I’m so happy not to be thinking about… Just don’t have to touch that tab key. Drew: You’re very lucky. John: Brutal. Thank you for all the hard work you did and in putting together this episode. In tribute to all your hard work, this outro is especially applicable. [Bonus Segment] John: All right, Drew. We’ve talked about this on the podcast, that Craig and I have never had managers. We didn’t grow up with them. It wasn’t such a big thing when we started in this industry. Craig especially was always very suspicious of managers or the need for managers. I have always tried to keep a more open mind. But I definitely thought of managers as being a thing that newer writers might need, because they needed more hand-holding. They needed somebody to walk them through the process. They needed extra bubble wrap around them to help them do their thing. That was not what I needed, because I’m a very established writer. I didn’t need that extra point of entry. But as you, master of the calendar, saw, I ended up having six manager meetings and I went and met with a bunch of managers. Drew: Yeah, six, which felt like a lot. Yeah, it’s surprising. John: The reason why it ended up being six is, when I started making the decision to look for a manager, I went to Ken Richman, who’s my attorney, to get suggestions for who we should meet with. He had good names and good numbers. I couldn’t stop at one place. But it also reminded me of when my daughter started looking for colleges, that yeah, you want to take a look at certain schools, but really you’re looking for types of schools. When we did our first college tour, we were looking for, okay, this is what it’s like being at a big school in a big city, versus a big school in a tiny town where the college takes over the town, or what it’s like to be a small college in a little, small town. What’s the right fit? What’s the right vibe gonna be? These were actually six very different types of managers to meet with. I needed a sense of what is it gonna feel like, as much as how specific those individual managers might be. Drew: Did you go into it knowing what you were looking for, or did you have an idea? John: To get into it, I guess we should start with explaining why I was even looking for a manager, because I’m a very experienced screenwriter. I didn’t need a lot of help on the screenwriting front. But I’m not a very experienced or established director. One of my priorities the next couple years is to do more directing. I needed a manager, I felt, to shepherd that part of my career, and so really focus on that. That was one of the things I was really looking for. As I was sitting down to meet with these managers, I would talk about what my priorities were for the next couple years ahead, what was working great and what I felt could work better. You sent through a list to all these managers beforehand of, like, “Here’s all the stuff I’m working on. Here are my priorities for what I want to spend my time doing.” When I actually sat down to meet with these places, you realized they really were so different in how they worked and how they functioned and how they felt, because some of them were really small. One was a single manager. Some were really small, little, boutiquey kind of places. Some were producing shows and they were doing a whole bunch of stuff and they had a bunch of different clients. They had sports people, and they had their own research department and all this stuff. Some felt like they were as big as the big agencies, like the CAAs or the WMEs. There really was a huge range of things. I asked similar questions of all the places, but it was also fun to hear their explanations for why they were set up the way they were set up. The places who don’t produce would say, “We don’t produce because we want to focus entirely on client service, really that old agency model, just focusing on what our clients need.” The places that did produce would say, “Because we’re out there producing, we actually know what it’s like to produce, and we actually get a lot of firsthand experience on what it takes to make something this year, next year, or the year after. We’re much more in contact with the places that you’ll be working with.” Drew: What is the argument for the client services then? Because as we just talked about in the episode, I know there’s a workaround, but managers can’t legally represent their clients in a contract situation. What would they be doing? How would that be working? John: I’m so happy we’re recording this without Craig, because right now Craig would be tearing his hair out, because one of Craig’s great frustrations is that managers should not, under California law, be doing some of the stuff that they end up doing, which is figuring out what the actual deal is. Managers can put you in the room, but in theory it should be your attorney and your agents who are doing that stuff. Some of my big writer colleagues don’t have agents anymore. They just have their managers, and it’s working out great for them. So it’s certainly a possibility. I did think about, if I were to have a manager, would I still need an agency? Some of the conversations I would have with these management companies is, “How do you work with agencies? What is the overlap?” because there is overlap. Different explanations, but some would describe it as being like the manager is the general leading the charge, but you need the army, and that army is often the agency. The manager might be the person who’s saying, “Okay, there’s these 15 calls we need to make. I’m gonna make these 10. Can you make these five?” They can be the CEO of the representation of that one client. Drew: Does that make it in any way awkward with your agents? John: It can, and so I had conversations with agents too about, “How do you feel about working with managers?” Some, they would say, in quite polite ways, that there are certain managers they love getting on the phone with and certain managers they dread getting on the phone with, and that sometimes it feels like it’s interfering with their ability to represent the client. In most cases though, managers represent many fewer people than an agent would. An agent might have 100, 150 clients they’re supposed to be repping, whereas a manager is focused on just a much smaller list, and so they can provide a little bit more direct attention to what that person needs that day and the day after and be thinking about a year down the road, what’s best for the client. Drew: You picked a manager. How’s it going so far? John: Good so far. What I would say is I found that the manager is more likely to be on Zoom with me. For example, we had a Zoom with the foreign finance people at the agency. It was good to have that manager there to ask the extra questions that I wasn’t thinking about. It’s been nice that they have different connections than my agents might. Even just on an email chain, a manager could say, “Oh, we rep them,” or, “I know that person, and so let me make that introduction, and that’s a thing that could work,” or, “It’s not public knowledge yet, but they’re gonna be busy for the next 18 months, so I don’t think that’s a good person for us to pursue next to direct this project.” That has been good and useful to have one outside person and an ability to reach outside the silo of… Part of the reason I was looking for a manager is because if you’re at an agency, yes, they in theory could work with everyone, and they should have information on all the stuff, but it’s hard for… If you’re at CAA, it’s a little bit weird for them to reach out to WME about one of the WME clients, whereas a manager can just pick up the phone and do it. Drew: That seems like a huge… Obviously, you have a giant contact list, but your contact list expands exponentially, and knowledge too with that. John: Yeah. All that said, it’s new and it’s different and it’s a little bit weird. As we established on the podcast, I kind of like being a little bit uncomfortable and trying things that are outside of my comfort zone. For me, for that, it’s been good. It’s a change. It’s a development. It’s fun that we’re doing this episode now, looking back 12 years to when we first started the agent and manager conversation, for me to suddenly have a manager, which I’ve never had before. Drew: I’m excited. I think it’s a cool new chapter. John: Cool. Drew, thanks for getting this episode together. Drew: Thanks, John. Links: Episode 2 – How to get an agent and/or manager Episode 172 – Franz Kafka’s brother, and the perfect agent Episode 7 – Firing a manager, and trying new software How ‘Go,’ the Wildest, Druggiest, Horniest Cult Movie of 1999 Got Made (And Almost Didn’t) by Paul Schrodt for GQ Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt! Check out the Inneresting Newsletter Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription! Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter John on Mastodon Outro by James Llonch (send us yours!) This episode’s segments were originally produced by Stuart Friedel. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Email us at [email protected] You can download the episode here.The post Scriptnotes, Episode 643: Agents and Managers 101, Transcript first appeared on John August.

The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it. Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin. John: You’re listening to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Now, if one were to eavesdrop on the conversations happening at Los Angeles restaurants or the chatter occurring on Zoom meetings before everyone gets there, you might assume things are pretty rough in Hollywood these days. Today on the show, we’ll look at what’s going on in the industry, its historical analogs, and some suggestions for what might fix it. Craig: I’m sure that they’ll listen to that, right? We’ll suggest what to do. John: We’ll suggest the things. Craig: And then they’ll do it. John: The industry bigwigs will do it. Craig: They’ll do it. John: It’s not even just the industry bigwigs. It’s really the structural fundamental changes that will happen, or maybe we don’t need to do anything. It’ll all sort itself out. We’ll also answer listener questions. And in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, what happens after we die. No, Craig, we’re not talking about the afterlife. Craig: Thank god. John: What specifically happens to all of our accounts and passwords and other aspects of our digital lives and what preparations should we make, should Craig or I or Drew, for that matter, suddenly keel over and all our stuff is there. Craig: Sweet release. Yes. John: Sweet relief for us, but not for our heirs, not for everybody else. Craig: No, everybody else is gonna have a mess to clean up. But we will be free, released- John: Free. Craig: … back into the simulation. John: Clear. Craig: Yes. Drew Marquardt: No. Craig: No. John: First we have some follow-up. To start us off with, Javier in Peru apparently has some corrections about our Star Wars beer ads. Drew: The Star Wars beer commercials were real, but not in Peru. They happened in Chile. Craig: Ah, all right. Then apologies to Isabela Merced, who is Peruvian, and ha ha Pedro Pascal, who is from Chile. John: Love it all. But apparently, that was not the only mistake Craig made in Episode 641. Craig: Oh, good. Drew: Daniel wrote, “Craig referred to the birthday paradox and got it wrong in the same way that Johnny Carson famously did. The paradox is not that if you have 23 people, there’s more than 50 percent chance that at least one will have your birthday. In fact, that’s very unlikely. The paradox is that in a group of 23 people, there’s a more than 50 percent chance that at least two of them share the same birthday. This is actually a simple calculation, as it’s one minus probability that they all have different birthdays.” Craig: You know what, Daniel? Absolutely correct. This isn’t me being defensive. I knew that. I think I just said it wrong. I misspoke. But yes, I did in fact know that that was what it was, so you do get the gold star for the correction. I have no problem saying oh, darn it, I blew it, but in this case, I just misspoke. I did know the nature of that. John: Now, apparently, Craig was not the only person who made a small mistake or a small issue of disagreement in 641. James wrote in and actually send audio. I think because of the nature of this, we’re gonna play James’s audio, which is fantastic. Let’s take a listen to James. James: In addition to the email, John, I thought you ought to hear from a native New Yorker. I was born in Brookdale Hospital. My father was born in Brookdale Hospital. We are still here. Our accents are still here. I’m a Black dude, so you gotta throw in the AAVN, whatever. My parents are from the South, so I got New York, I got down South. But I always tell people either go from y’all or yous, depending on who I’m talking to. You know what I’m saying? I understand what you saying, but Brooklyn has more people than Philly. We gotta stop seeing four or five gentrifiers in Bushwick, Greenpoint, and they represent Brooklyn. No, they don’t. They will be in another city in five years. My mother is buried in Brooklyn. I’m just saying that to say that we still here. You gotta move around. I don’t know where to send people these days to find a real New York accent. But it’s not the vegan dude with the mustache and his stupid lumberjack, whatever that is, that nonsense. He wasn’t wearing that in high school. Come to Brooklyn, he gonna change all of a sudden. Whatever, dude. But like I said, the Brooklyn accent is still in effect, no question about it. I’m writing characters. All my stories are set in New York City with real New York natives. I gotta hear that accent, because like I said, people only associate the accent with white people, to be honest with you. But like I said, we out here. It’s funny, because whenever rappers from New York go anywhere, the first thing they talk about – these are Black rappers, of course – is our accent, because they know where we from: New York. Craig: Oh, man. John: Oh, man. Craig: I love James so much. I just want to hug him. That is the sound of my youth. James, Brooklyn-born Craig over here. Absolutely. There’s a generational thing. There are different kinds of accents inside of Brooklyn. What we think of as that classic Brooklyn accent, I would say it’s an accent that was predominant in the mid-20th century and mostly among white people. Very specific things. For instance, my grandfather wouldn’t say “toilet.” He would say “TUR-lit”. The TUR-lit. That is a specific thing. But Black Brooklyn accent is also a specific thing. That was awesome. That was a great example of it. There are all those different accents. What he’s referring to as, I guess we would call them the hipster Brooklyn people, I agree. My mom grew up in Bensonhurst, and she still has that accent. The mid-20th century Brooklyn accent’s very strong. John: It’s fantastic to hear James’s voice. On 641 I talked about how the fact that when casting breakdowns say they want Brooklyn accents, what are you actually talking about? They probably honestly really want James. But if you actually look at who’s living in Brooklyn right now, you can’t guarantee that a person that you pluck off the street in Brooklyn is gonna have that accent. I was just in Brooklyn actually this whole last week. I was there for the Brooklyn half-marathon, which was really fun. I got to run through all the neighborhoods of Brooklyn. It was fantastic, and I loved it. James also makes the very good point that Brooklyn is huge. Brooklyn would be the fourth biggest city in America if it was its own city. Craig: It’s massive. John: It’s nuts how huge Brooklyn is. In that giant not-quite-city. You’re going to find all sorts of different accents, but this is the one that I think people are really talking about. We just need to actually denote specifically what you want when you want to hear James, because we want to hear James. Craig: I’m gonna go ahead and put an R rating on the episode here. Hannibal Buress has one of the funniest things. He’s talking about these people in Brooklyn that James is referring to with their lumberjack shirts. I’m paraphrasing, but he’s like, “I don’t mind if you want to wear a lumberjack shirt and have a waxed curly mustache, but don’t talk to me like you aren’t standing there looking like a carnival face motherfucker.” Carnival face is the funniest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. John: So good. Craig: Carnival face. We are so far past the whole hipster thing. We’re probably 12 generations of pop culture cycle hipsterism now. God only knows what it’s up to now. I sure do like James for just being as real and true Brooklyn as possible. God, I hope he’s a Yankees fan. I don’t know what to say. If he’s a Mets fan, it’s gonna break my heart. James, can you just let us know, Mets or Yankees. John: I want James making movies too. I’m glad he’s listening to the show. I’m glad he’s writing. I want to see what he makes. Also in Episode 641, we talked about gendered words. We’ve talked about blonde with an E versus blond without an E. Ian wrote in to point out that there actually is a male equivalent. The male word for brunette is brunet. Really, it’s without the extra T and the E on the end. I’ve never seen that used in English. Have you? Craig: I have not, but it’s certainly consistent with the way French works. Brunette is not a word that I ever use anyway. John: Yeah, it’s weird. Craig: What’s wrong with just brown? Brown hair? John: What is wrong with brown? It got me thinking as we had this discussion. Why don’t we just use the Anglo-Saxon word for blond? Because there were Anglo-Saxon blonds. Why don’t we use that? I looked it up, and the Anglo-Saxon word for blond is whitlock. Craig: Great. Let’s use it. John: Which means wheat-haired. Whit is wheat, and lock is that… I had a friend, Paige Whitlock, who I went to college with, who had blonde hair. Craig: Wow. John: Her name was Paige Blonde. Craig: That’s on theme. Also, there’s towheaded, which we usually use for children. My oldest kid was a towhead. I guess that’s a slightly different meaning. Yellow isn’t really a great descriptor of what blond hair is, because blond hair is more of that kind of lightish brown. To me, truly yellow is you’ve dyed your hair. John: There are people who are almost just platinum blond, but it tends to be really young people, who have strikingly blond hair. Craig: Towheads. John: Towheads. Craig: Towheads. John: Also in 641, we asked people who had to deal with putting in the act breaks and streaming shows if they had firsthand experience to write in. Somebody did. Drew: JG writes, “I have a few features running on services like Prime, Tubi, and Roku. The service that distributes those movies to those sites, Filmhub, requires that you provide metadata with commercial breaks for each movie. Their rule is you have to offer a break every 12 minutes or less, but not more. As a producer submitting the movies, it’s my job to go in and fill in the time codes for where each commercial breaks will take place. My goal was always to find the best or least intrusive spot for the breaks. But I suspected if a producer didn’t provide the metadata, the system would randomly insert the commercials within that 12-minute framework. It was a frustrating and time-consuming process, because as we know, movies aren’t designed for ad breaks. I know I opted for more breaks than I might’ve needed in order to put breaks at what felt like the most opportune moments.” John: This feels like delivery requirements. We probably have talked about this on one of our 642 episodes before this. If you make a feature and you are delivering a feature to the buyer, they will have a whole long list of delivery requirements, which is not just, “Here’s the finished film,” but, “Here’s all the audio. Here’s all the paperwork that shows that we actually control all the music in this.” Delivery requirements will also be apparently now this metadata for where the commercial breaks should go. Not surprising that they’re asking for it, but JG had to do this him or herself. Craig: Yeah, that’s actually a good point. I don’t think we’ve ever talked about delivery requirements. We’re so focused on how do you write a screenplay, how do you get something made into a television show or a movie, but there is a kind of industrial aspect of all this, where what you provide needs to meet legal requirements. It is a product to some people. We think of it as art, but there are people who must make sure that there is some sort of quality control and product uniformity. That means there is a minimum run time that it must hit. There are long lists of requirements for credits. How large are the credits? Where do the credits go? How big are the credits? Is that per individual deals? Is that per union bargaining agreements? There are certain delivery requirements in terms of sound levels. There are delivery requirements in terms of the fidelity of the image. Do you have to submit in a certain resolution or more or less? Do you have to supply it with sound that is capable to be both stereo only or surround? Is it full surround? Is it 5.1? Is it 7.1? Blah blah blah blah blah. All that technical stuff, there are just entire departments working on that, to make sure that when you and I get our job done, that wherever it ends up, it’s theoretically hitting some minimum level of quality. John: Where our listeners are gonna probably run into this is that if you go off and make an independent film, you’re like, “Great. I spent the money. I made this independent film. I maxed out my credit cards. I’m selling it to this company.” They say, “Great. Here are the delivery requirements.” Suddenly, you have tens of thousands of dollars more expenses you have to incur in order to deliver the thing that they are buying. That could be a real drain. On my movie The Nines, we had to deliver in this format and that format and the other format. We had to deliver a cut negative. There were things I required. Craig: Negative cutting, there’s something that no one worries about anymore. Hey, kids. Listen up. You would film on film, and then by the time you and I were working in the business, the images would be transferred to video using something called a Telecine. Then that video would be digitized into your digital editor, your Avid probably. You would edit on that. That would create an EDL, an edit decision list. Every single shot has a frame. Then when all that was done and the picture was locked, they would send those just reams of paper with all of the ins and outs of every single shot. Then negative cutters would take the negative of the film and a splicer and a chopper, and they would begin to assemble it painstakingly over the course of I don’t know how many days, creating one long Frankenstein negative that was the edited film. That was then run through and reprinted onto a single negative. Then that was the thing that they made. I believe that’s how that worked. Then we ended up with a DI, digital interpositive, and all that other stuff. Now the workflow, unless you’re dealing with Christopher Nolan or a filmmaker that’s really committed to physical film, all that’s gone. There is no more negative cutting. John: Yeah. Not only would you need to deliver a print or something else that could be distributed, as Craig was saying, the sound has to be in this format versus that format. You had to deliver a print that has the sound printed on it. There were all these requirements. Some of those have gone away. As JG is saying, now there are new requirements. I didn’t have to, at that point, supply where the commercial breaks are. With my movie The Nines, one of the things I was required to do was to deliver a broadcast-ready version of the movie, basically a sanitized version of the movie that could be aired on, realistically, cable. I remember talking with the company who was doing that, and here were their suggestions for how we were going to get that done. It was crazy. As far as I know, it hasn’t ever aired on basic cable, but there is a cut someplace that could do it. Craig: Somewhere. We went through this on Season 1 of The Last of Us. We had to go through a delivery process that held two weeks to convert the image into HDR, high dynamic range, which some televisions can make use of. That two weeks was brutal actually, because we were right up against it to try and get things done. A lot of movies and television shows are right up against it because of the proliferation of visual effects, how many visual effects there are, getting those visual effects delivered in time and then shoving it through the rest of the sausage factory, including things like HDR and all that other fun stuff. Yay the people that do the delivery stuff, because god knows I would butcher it. John: Oh, yeah, also because it’s a job that you are doing once. You are doing maybe once or twice a year if you’re just doing a lot of stuff. You would need a person whose job it is to do that every day, who actually understands what these things actually mean on paper and what they actually take in time. That’s why you have post-production supervisors and- Craig: Sure do. John: … contractual obligation people who oversee stuff, people who are figuring out what the credits are, what that run is. It’s a lot. Craig: There’s a reason that there are all those names in the credits. John: Now, before we get on to our main topic, a few episodes back we had Ken White come on, and he did a great job of talking through the realities of the law we see on TV and the lawyer-client relationship we see on TV versus realities. I was thinking we should do that for some other professions, because there’s professions we see all the time in film and television, and we don’t know what the actual realities are behind that. This is a thing where our listeners may be able to help us out. Some things we would love to be able to talk with people about. A private investigator. If you know or are a private investigator who does the kinds of things we see on TV but the reality version of that, we’d love to talk with you. A military specialist. We see all these military actions in film and television. We don’t know what the realities are behind that. Public school teachers, especially in high school. There’s a whole genre of teacher movies. We could talk a little bit more about teachers. Police officers, of course. We see cop stuff all the time. Be curious to see what the realities are there. Then we have a few more long reaches. We have an astronaut on deck. We could talk about that. If you have suggestions for this is a person who actually does this job who could be a great guest on Scriptnotes, write in to [email protected], because in the weeks ahead, we’d love to do more of those kind of episodes. Let’s get on to our main topic here, which is, man, things are just terrible, or they feel kind of terrible. Literally, at dinner last night, I was sitting with a group of other writers and filmmakers. It’s really tough to set up a project now, to sell a project right now. Craig, you may be a little bit insulated from this, because you’re up in Vancouver, you’re doing your TV show. Your head’s down, doing your work. But for the rest of us who are down here in Los Angeles, it is really weird and tough in a way that is just different than previous years. Craig: Insulated though I may be, because I have a television show that’s on and running, I hear about it all the time. There’s no part of me that’s like, “I don’t know. I don’t know what everyone’s cranking on about.” No. There has been a significant – I hesitate to use the word correction, because that implies that things were wrong prior. There has been a significant change in both the quantity of shows that are being made, the way they’re being made, the amount of episodes that are being made, the costs of those series. Everything has changed in such a way that there’s a squeeze now. I think that a lot of the issues that we’re dealing with were anticipated by and partially addressed by the strike. The things that the Writers Guild were looking for dovetailed entirely with the problems that we see now. What’s important to always keep in mind is the Writers Guild negotiates a collective bargaining agreement for people who are hired. The Writers Guild, even with the minimum guaranteed room size, that’s not going to be something that keeps 9,000 people at work if there aren’t 9,000 jobs. It’s just not how it goes. There is no way to insulate the workforce from a contraction like the one we’re seeing right now. John: Yeah, for sure. We’ll put links in the show notes to two different articles. The one that had the most people talking about it the last couple weeks was one by Daniel Bessner, he was writing for Harpers, called The Life and Death of Hollywood. It’s really recapping what’s been happening over the last few decades and how we got to this moment. For a lot of people, it’s gonna be very familiar territory. But there were a couple of quotes and interviews in there that stuck out. The first one I want to talk about is Alena Smith. She wrote and created the series Dickinson for Apple TV. She says, “It’s like a whole world of intellectuals and artists got a multi-billion dollar grant from the tech world, but we mistook that and were, frankly, actively gaslit into thinking that was because they cared about art.” What’s she’s saying here is that we did, with a rise to streaming, just get suddenly a whole bunch of new opportunities to make weird, cool shit, but we shouldn’t ever confuse ourselves that they wanted to make the weird, cool shit because they wanted us to be artistically satisfied. They were chasing audience. They were chasing just esoteric, strange audience. Their whole goal was to get as many people as possible to subscribe to these shows. They really weren’t that obsessed with how successful any individual show was. Now, the correction is that they really want those shows to be hits, and that is likely largely driving some of this contraction and this retreat to safety that we’re seeing in the things they’re actually choosing to make. Craig: I think the phrase “too good to be true” comes to mind. You said they were chasing an audience. I’m not even sure they were chasing an audience. I don’t even know what they were doing. In terms of the amount of content that was being created, it seemed like they were trying to build overwhelming libraries of stuff. Instead of saying, “Hey, come to our new store, because if you like pants, we have pants,” they were saying, “Hey, we built a new Walmart. We have literally everything you could possibly ever want. Go wander the aisles.” It’s Costco of stuff. What they weren’t doing, and I couldn’t understand it, was having any concern whatsoever with who, if anyone, was watching some of these shows. When the Warner Bros-Discovery merger happened, there was this immediate convulsion, because under the direction of the CEO, they took off a bunch of things from the streaming service. In the articles, there were these little mentions that some of the things that they had taken off were being watched by tens of people, so in a statistical sense, unwatched. There was so much stuff. Because everything is expensive when you are creating demand, high labor demand, the cost of things, not necessarily of the writers, but the cost of production and key actors start to go up. Everything inflates. What we ended up with was a bubble. The only thing that I would say to Alena is that the studios and networks have been actively gaslighting writers forever. This is not new. They are constantly lying to us any time they say, “Hey, we love you. We love your mind, and we love what you do.” They’re lying. What they’re saying is, “We hope to god that whatever it is that you do, which we may not even understand, people become obsessed with and pay us to watch.” That’s all they’re ever saying. That’s all they’ve ever said. That’s all they ever will say. But they dress it up in all sorts of alluring phrases. What changed during the bubble time was they actually didn’t seem to care about anything. They just wanted stuff to get made. It was almost like in the late ’80s and early ’90s when home video made it so everything was profitable. In this case, profit didn’t matter. Therefore, they made everything. John: I’m really glad you brought up the difference between audience and just doing stuff to do stuff, because it reminds me of criticism I see of web traffic. For a long time, these websites were generating huge numbers of eyeballs. People were seeing stories on these sites. Everything was about chasing views. But there’s a difference between views and audience. An audience actually likes the thing you’re doing and wants to come back and see it again. They actually really engage with the content you’re making, versus someone who drops by your site and then immediately bounces back off and leaves. Many websites are having to retool and really think about who do we actually want to attract to what we’re providing, and how do we keep them engaged and involved. That does feel like the same kind of distinction we’re seeing here is that they were trying to build these megamalls and recognizing that most of these stores that they were opening up, no one wanted to walk into. Also in this article, they were talking about the short-termism that happens is because once you actually start just looking, like, quarter by quarter, how much are we growing these things, when you have investors really wanting to see, “We have to have a return on investment immediately,” that’s not a very good way to make movies and TV shows. You need to be able to think a little bit longer than just the next quarter for how you guys are doing and then to try to correct out of the situation, you end up making these gargantuan cuts that are so brutal. Craig: We are getting pretty violent pendulum swing/whiplash syndrome here. A healthy industry does make money, because if they don’t, then they fall apart and they stop hiring us. We have a vested interest in a healthy industry. If the industry decides, “We actually don’t care about profit anymore. We’re just gonna borrow crazy amounts of money and spend crazy amounts of money with no goal in sight,” then it is inevitable that they are going to then pendulum swing back to keep themselves alive. The pendulum swing will be too much of a squeeze, too much of a minimization, because they are now trying to pay back their own bad decisions. But ideally, this whiplash pendulum effect settles down and we find ourselves back in some kind of healthy balance, where the studios are making money, don’t feel like their backs are against the wall, are no longer in a wild cocaine spree of spending, and then hopefully are able to go back to the way it used to be. “Here’s some safe stuff. Here’s some slightly risky stuff. Here’s a little bit of this. Here’s a little bit of that. But overall, we have a balanced slate.” John: There’s a quote here from Jason Grote, who is talking about prestige TV. He’s really talking about the HBO model of prestige TV, so like The Sopranos, and when you suddenly got like, “Oh my god, we have this really good TV.” He’s pointing out that it wasn’t about a bunch of new people coming into Hollywood. It was a bunch of people who actually really knew how to make TV shows, who were suddenly given the opportunity to make the TV shows they really wanted to make. That feels like a crucial distinction. It’s not just about newcomers making brand new stuff. It was actually like, “Oh, let’s actually take some chances on some people who actually know what they’re doing.” Craig: Yes, and I’m a beneficiary of this. No question. There are a lot of people who worked for a long time, making the things that they were told to make, the way they were told to make them. They had to fit in a certain box. There had to be ratings. There had to be this. There had to be that. It had to be for a particular budget, repeatable for 22 or 26 episodes a season. All of those restraints suddenly disappeared. You did get remarkable stuff. Now, there are some things that are excellent that also get huge audiences. There are things that are excellent that don’t. I think a lot of those things in part suffered more from where they were and how they were, or often, not even, marketed, because in the crazy gush of content, it was almost like nobody making the stuff had time to even tell you about it. They threw it in your face as you were walking by. Maybe you took it, and maybe you didn’t, and then you just kept going. But that’s absolutely true. Vince Gilligan is such a good example. He was making great network television. It was standard network television. But when you said to him, “Hey, do what you want.” Same thing with David Chase. Charlie Kaufman worked on – was it Alf? I think it was Alf. When you let certain writers go free… But no question; it wasn’t like prestige TV helped, for instance, under-represented writers. It didn’t. John: Wrapping up on Bessner’s article here, I think his last suggestion is frustrating, because he undercuts it immediately after he says it. But he’s talking about, oh, the one change which would actually make a big difference is if we let these writers control the copyright on the things that they make. As we’ve talked about since probably Episode 1 of this show, there’s a reason why that doesn’t happen in the U.S. It’s because that’s what lets us have the powerful union that we have. The other good counterexample is, in lots of other places in the world, writers can control the copyright. It’s not like it’s awesome for them there. Craig: No. When you see somebody suggesting that the answer to a screenwriter’s ills is retaining copyright, you know you’re dealing with a tyro or somebody who is simply from the outside and doesn’t get it. It is a nonstarter and it’s a bad idea. You’re absolutely right. We can simply point to the rest of the world and say, “Show me in the rest of the world where writers for television or film are being compensated the way American writers are. Show me in the rest of the world where writers for television and film get a pension the way American writers do, get residuals the way American writers do, get credit protections the way American writers do.” You can’t. You can’t. The copyright suggestion just falls apart anyway, because we don’t publish screenplays to be read by people. It is a part of a composite work. That’s kind of a huge red flag that maybe somebody didn’t do the research they needed to do. John: The second article we’ll put a link in the show notes to is One Weird Trick for Fixing Hollywood by Max Read. Craig: I like this. John: He starts out by talking about how among his screenwriter friends, it is just really tough. It’s the same conversation you and I have about our screenwriter friends. The only things that are getting made, in his case he’s hearing about ultra premium limiteds, which are a six-episode miniseries that has an A-list star. I would say even that is very hard to shop and get made right now. No one wants to buy those things. I’ve been out with things like that, and it’s still really tough. The number of projects that have, “That’s a great writer,” the script’s already written, there’s a director on board, there’s an actor on board, the number of those that have not sold in the last six months is just mind-boggling. There’s no guarantees about what’s going to happen. What I did like about Max’s article is that he points out the bigger issue that the industry as a whole is facing is that we have a lot of new competition for the amount of time that people would normally spend watching TV or going to a movie, and that’s because we have phones, we have other things that are going to keep our eyes entertained during the day. That’s time that we’re just not gonna be watching TV. The amount of hours viewed of the television that’s being made or the movies that are out there is gonna suffer. Craig: This is an odd argument to me, I have to admit. Billions of people are watching things that are on Netflix and Amazon and Max and network television, which still earns millions of viewers a week. The old stuff, Suits and Friends, these things get recycled again and are watched by millions and millions of people and then discussed on TikTok. TikTok, in fact, is where a lot of these shows get their popularity in the first place. You and I talked about how our kids got caught up in this crazy TikTok phenomenon of watching Criminal Minds, a show that was never intended for 16-year-old girls to watch, and yet there was this massive wave of girls one summer – mostly girls as far as I could tell – watching Criminal Minds and discussing it together on TikTok. I don’t understand, A, the argument that the problem with television is that people aren’t watching it. They are. We have fragmented the audience across 4 billion shows. At peak TV, the John Landgraf phrase, I think there were over 600 television shows made in a single year. The audience probably grew, but it was spread out over 600 shows. This is a division problem. It’s not an addition problem. Second, I don’t understand how to solve Hollywood by going off and supporting or helping YouTube and that. That’s not Hollywood. That’s a different thing. We need to protect this business as it functions here, because what people do on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and Twitch and Twitter is not Hollywood. It’s its own thing, which is massive and incredibly profitable and valid, but it’s different. John: It is different. I’m gonna make his argument that I don’t fully endorse, but just so it’s actually made. His metaphor would be, let’s say you are a home builder who’s building apartment buildings, and then a few blocks away you see there are these hobbyists who are building things that are basically like buildings, that are competing for the housing of people around you, but they’re doing it much cheaper and without any of your protections. You would be thinking about that. You would be looking, like, “Shit. How am I going to be competing against them if they are doing it cheaper?” Craig: If I bought into the premise that we’ll call the paramedia is limiting the audience or ruining the audience for what Hollywood does, yes. There’s an argument to be made that the theatrical experience has been permanently damaged by both the pandemic and the paramedia, but not the streaming business. The streaming business was damaged by the fact that the business plan made no fucking sense. The streaming business was damaged by the fact that they were spending more than they could ever hope to make back, with no end in sight. All of them decided they should try and outspend each other. But the viewership is enormous. Enormous. We’re talking about tens and tens of millions of people in the United States alone, much less the rest of the world. Netflix has an audience that has, I don’t think, ever existed before in terms of size. I include them, of course, as part of Hollywood. I don’t buy that the audience is being taken away. My concern about the way things have been going is that none of it made any sense. It all felt a little bit like MoviePass to me, where you and I would look at it and go, “You spend $80 billion try and get $5 billion? Why?” John: The answer is because there was a time when tech companies could do that, and sometimes it had great outcomes because of that. Google was an example, or Amazon was an example of companies that burned money until they became incredibly profitable. I think there was a thought that these legacy studios could burn money and then suddenly become profitable. Netflix was able to do that. In order to compete against Netflix, we need to become Netflix. It didn’t quite work out that way. Craig: It didn’t work great. I think that there’s been a settling in. We do have some more convulsions on the way, because Paramount is clearly up for sale. As we’re talking, maybe it’s already been sold. I know Sony has put in a bid. Disney bought Fox. Let’s say Sony buys Paramount. We’re now squishing ourselves down, but in a way also getting back to the number of things that we used to have, because if you include Amazon and Netflix and Apple, those are three big studios. We’ve lost Fox. We’re about to use Paramount. We’re getting back almost to the same number of studios that have always kind of existed. It will be interesting to see in the years to come if we can achieve some kind of stability again in our business. John: In talking with agents and managers and other folks who are on the sale side of stuff, they will agree that this is a really tough time. But there are some, I won’t say brighter spots, but there are some areas that are less affected. There’s still money to make indie features. That pool of money is still out there, and there’s still a market for that. There’s ways to do that, especially things that come to a certain price. I was talking to a documentary filmmaker who said that he’s been working on this thing that he was originally gonna pitch as a three-episode documentary series. You can’t do that now. People aren’t gonna buy that now. But he can make it as a documentary feature, so, “Great. I’m gonna pivot. Same story. I’ll do it in 90 minutes versus I guess 90 minutes in three episodes.” It all works out. The same thing happens for narrative features as well. I also think we just need to be mindful that, the classic truism, you miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take. People can be so gun-shy to actually try to do something that they’re looking past simpler things they could try to do. If these $200 million movies are not working out for you and you’re losing money on them, maybe take a look at the Anyone But Yous, smaller movies that are successful, and just try some of those, because there may be some different ways and different kinds of movies and series you can make that are gonna be cheaper, that can actually give you the outcome you want. Craig: This has been going on for quite some time. The squish of the small movie preexists all the Netflix stuff. It preexists the pandemic. The chasing of massive things really accelerated with the Avengers. You can draw a line where the Avengers came out, did what it did, and everybody said, “Okay, I guess this is our business now, because the amount of movies we have to make and the amount of swings we have to take to match one of those.” One of those gets you four more of those. That keeps your business afloat for years. Years. John: We are making some big, expensive movies that pay off. Dune 2 was incredibly expensive. It paid off. It’s not going to generate a bunch of more Dune movies, most likely, but it was great that it happened. We of course had Barbenheimer, was a great success for both of those films. Those films were very profitable and big successes. I think what we’re urging this industry to do is to take a look at what were the things about those films that were successful. They were made by great, visionary filmmakers who were swinging for the fences and doing interesting things. It wasn’t a retreat to safety that made those things giant hits. Craig: I’ll point to a movie that is one of my favorite examples. I think the budget was something like $60 million. This movie was from 2019. In 1990 or 2000s, that would be the classic $35, $40 million movie. Joker. Joker was a hard R. It was kind of an art film. It borrowed a little bit of comic book shine, but barely any. There were superpowers. There were really no action scenes. It was an art film. The box office for Joker is $1 billion. Joker: Folie à Deux is coming out. That is the kind of bet that I think is well worth taking and is terrifying. John: Let’s also talk about Joker is that not everybody liked it. In fact, a lot of people hated Joker and to this day hate Joker. You know what? That’s okay, because it doesn’t have to appeal to everyone in order to be a giant success. Craig: People talk about the four-quadrant movie. There are movies you can make that everybody likes. There are very few movies you can make that everybody loves. But what you can do are make films that some people love so much that they will evangelize them, they will market them for you, they will see them multiple times, they will buy them again when they come on the streaming service. Joker is a great example of that and the definition of a risky pitch. By the way, the sequel looks just as risky to me. John: Totally. Craig: Good for them. It’s a big budget. John: Here was the bet. The bet was that there wasn’t an audience for it. It wasn’t the bet that everybody in America will want to see this movie. It was that it was talking about there’s gonna be an audience, and that by definition of audience, people who will genuinely love this movie. Craig: Yes. That kind of artistic risk taking, which I think you could also see with Barbie… There’s so many ways to make Barbie bad. There are about a million ways to make a bad Barbie. John: Oh my god. Almost every way is to make a bad Barbie. Craig: There’s pretty much one way to make a great one. Trusting somebody like Greta Gerwig, that’s risky. It is. They used to just have a bland filmmaker deliver a bland script for these things, to hit the thick middle and hedge their bet, and they didn’t do that with that one. Oppenheimer only gets made because Christopher Nolan is the kind of filmmaker who gets to do stuff. That’s it. Again, nobody’s sitting there thinking, “Oppenheimer’s gonna make a hell of a lot of money.” How much did Oppenheimer make? $965 million globally. John: Love it. Craig: That’s insane. That’s insane. That’s a biopic of the guy that ran the nuclear program. We’ve made movies about the nuclear bomb before. We’ve made movies about the father of the nuclear bomb before. Universal said, “We will take this huge bet. We will spend $100 million on this.” An algorithm most likely would say, “Oh, that’ll get you $30 or $40 million.” But instead, they made almost a billion dollars, because it’s a quality film. What’s the bet there by Universal? Good movie, people will come and see it. That’s old-school thinking. Really old-school thinking. You know what else we see out there that’s old-school thinking? Ads on television shows. John: It’s craziness. Craig: We may be hurdling ourselves backwards to 1988. Let’s find out. John: Craig, a term I heard this last week, I saw it in a blog post by Hannah Ritchie, who writes about environmental issues, was the Moloch trap. Have you ever heard this term, the Moloch, M-O-L-O-C-H? Craig: I only know that from the Bible and Watchmen. What is the Moloch trap? John: The Moloch trap, it’s these forces that coerce and cause competing individuals to take actions which although are the best for them individually, ultimately lead to situations where everyone is worse off. It’s almost impossible to break out of that cycle. Tragedy of the commons is kind of an example of that. But there’s a lot of things in environmental science that are Moloch traps, because, okay, I recognize that burning coal is bad for everybody and it’s bad for this, but if I stop burning coal, then other people are gonna burn coal. It’s very hard for any one individual to make a change or any individual nation to make a change, because the forces force you to do that. I do feel like there’s a Moloch trap happening with the streaming wars, because it was like everyone was trying to do this thing. I think everyone recognized this thing we’re doing is unsustainable, but if I don’t do it, then I’m worse off. Craig: Right. Basically either we’re all sinking together or one or two of us need to sink. I don’t want to be one of the one or two that sinks. John: It’s hard to break out of the Moloch trap, but you do it by basically changing your motivations, by embracing innovation. The case of environmental science, it’s now cheaper to make power without burning things, which is great. Now it’s like we’re out of this cycle because we just don’t do those things, because it’s actually cheaper to build solar panels or turbines or other things. We’re not competing on these limited resources anymore, because we can just do stuff, and we actually think about abundance rather than limitations. I do wonder whether there’s some way we can be thinking about changing our motivations and our goals here to break out of the cycle. Instead of always thinking about subscriber numbers or this or that, really thinking about what are the markers of success that we want for this. Profitability, sure, but with ads or with other stuff. Is there other ways we can think about how we’re judging whether this project was worth making, that are not purely based on the impossible metrics? Craig: Hollywood is not a great place to try and metric yourself to success. The reason is, unlike basically every other industry, there’s something going on here that is incredibly unpredictable and also incredibly attractive. Our business creates culture, which is exciting and alluring, and predictable, sort of, a little bit, sometimes, but mostly not. Betting is really on human beings saying to you, “The thing I love and like, a lot of people will love and like.” You don’t know if that’s true or not. Your gut may not be particularly good or it may be okay. Your job basically rests in their hands. Hollywood will always frustrate the modelers and the quants. It’s why I think people that just want to make money don’t bother with Hollywood. But if you want to make money and be part of something exciting and meaningful, yeah, Hollywood. John: That’s why people make Broadway theater. That’s why people invest in independent films. The last point I’ll make here is that I think we’ve talked about the quants. They are doing these calculations that are incredibly esoteric, and it’s really hard to know what is the purpose behind, that they’re basically the navigators in Dune who are adjusting this device to get them from one place to another place. But this is not Dune. I think there was something really good about the simplicity of Nielsen ratings and box office weekend grosses that lets you know was this a successful thing or was this not a successful thing. During probably five years of streaming, no one knew. We never knew, was this successful, was this not successful. I don’t know what actually worked. I think that by making it so opaque, we were really hurting ourselves. Craig: It’s a really tricky thing. Have we talked about the new subscriber data thing on the show? John: The WGA one? Craig: I don’t think it was a WGA thing. It’s more a method of measuring, because one of the questions is, if you put all this stuff out there on your streaming service and it says, “We have a whole bunch of subscribers. Lots of them watch this,” did that show keep them subscribing? Hard to say. In fact, impossible to say. But one of the things they look at is, when we put a new show on, are there new subscribers? Are the new subscribers clearly coming in for that show? Now, it’s impossible to draw a perfect line, but you can kind of see these waves. They are trying to find ways to figure out which of these shows is actually contributing to the subscriber money and which are not. It’s hard to say, because let’s say you make a show and you put it on your streaming service and not a ton of people watch it, but those people are subscribing to your service only for that show. That’s valuable. Then you could have a show that a lot of people watch, but nobody’s gonna cancel it if the show gets canceled. Then what is that worth? These are very tricky things to figure out. John: They are tricky. I can see why an individual service might want to look at those numbers, but I don’t think it does the industry as a whole, or certainly the filmmakers they’re working with, all that much good to just trot out these weird, esoteric numbers. Tell me, is this show a hit? How many Americans or people worldwide are watching the show? Because that’s what really matters culturally is knowing this a very popular thing. There’s a reason why – what is the new Netflix series, Baby Reindeer? Craig: Yep. John: It broke out. We know it broke out because people are talking about it. They can also tell us that the numbers are really big. It’s great to see. That’s also again an example of a weird show that shouldn’t work and does and a risk that somebody took and it paid off. Craig: We used to have a line we could draw between watching and money. Like you said, people bought tickets. Every person that came to see the movie put money in your pocket. When there were ads, every single person that watched the show put money in your pocket. When you take away the ads and you take away the tickets and you just have a store that people can wander through and it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet, how do you know that people are paying for the buffet for the shrimp or the salad? You don’t. You just don’t know. Even in success, I think a lot of times these people might be going, “Okay, but is this success meaningful?” Let’s go back to the quote we got from Alena Smith, who said we were actively gaslit, because they don’t care about making an impression on culture, actually, I don’t think. I don’t think they care. I think what they care about is money. I think they are deeply confused about what is actually putting money in their pockets and what isn’t. They’re looking for something to hold onto, but it’s a lot of sand. It’s not that I’m gonna go so far as to say that I sympathize with the people sitting in the rooms trying to figure the math out. But from a problem-solving point of view, it’s a tricky one. John: The only point I’ll slightly push back against is you said they only cared about money. I think one of the issues was they weren’t caring about money for a number of years. Craig: Correct. John: They were just caring about growth, and then they realized. “Oh, and money will come at some point.” It’s like, but will it? That’s not sustainable. Craig: No. That’s a classic Silicon Valley think. Hollywood of old, those people were like, “I’m not making a picture unless I know it’s gonna make money, and that’s it!” I like talking like Tony Shalhoub from Barton Fink. That was the way it goes. Then suddenly, there were these other people like, “We got a better idea.” Silicon Valley is remarkable. They do these things that sometimes turn into these world-changing, axis-shifting, gabillion-dollar businesses. John: Absolutely. Craig: Sometimes they just set massive piles of money on fire and dance around it. It’s so bizarre. I don’t know what’s going on up there. John: We got our Quibis. Craig: We got our Quibis. We got our FTXs. We have our things that just were like, what in the hell is it? But hey, man, you know what? We just write them. John: We just write them. Craig: We just write them. John: Let’s answer some listener questions. The first one here is from Ellie. Drew: Ellie writes, “I’ve been receiving some incredible feedback on the first draft of my screenplay. However, I’m finding that I’m now super scared to move forward with any rewrites or editing things that I know that I have left to revisit on the second draft. It’s like the excellent feedback has made me feel scared and completely frozen. I literally feel tense. It’s quite a timely story, so I really feel I want to get this out in the world ASAP. Perhaps I’m also afraid of the unknown of what I’ll do with a second draft. Ach, help. How do I unfreeze myself?” John: I hear you, Ellie. That’s a familiar state, because here’s the thing. Your first draft, it wasn’t perfect, but it was complete and full and you loved it. It was an expression of what your original intentions were. You get this feedback, and they’re describing something that’s maybe even better, but you don’t know that you can actually do it. That’s probably a fear, a perfectionism. There’s all sorts of things that are holding you back. Man, you just gotta go for it. You gotta jump in and I would say pick some random moment in that thing and get going. Craig: I too have had this, Ellie. You’ve described it so well that it’s making me feel tense, because I’ve been here so many times. I’m gonna say something that is maybe a little bit scary, but there’s some sunlight at the end of it. The second draft is usually worse than the first. John: It is. Craig: It’s just part of the process. This is one of the reasons why. Your first draft was knitted together, and now you’re starting to pull stuff. You know that you have to change things, and you know that there are some things you want to change. But now when you pull stuff, you’re gonna make wounds, you’re gonna diminish some things. You might step on something that it turns out was incredibly important. Allow yourself to write the second draft that is worse than the first draft, as long as you can say to the people you’re working with, “I’m gonna go for some stuff on the second draft. This one will be a little messy.” The third draft is where it’s all gonna happen, because that’s the one where you get it back and then some. John: Ellie, a technique that might work for you, and this sounds counter-intuitive, but actually start with a blank page. You might want to just open up a new document, and in this new document, type bullet points of, like, “These are the new scenes. This is the new stuff that’s happening.” Start to write those new scenes. Then from your old script, copy through the scenes of the moments that are actually gonna come through unchanged, where you’re not doing anything, because that may actually help you avoid the problem of just like, “Oh, I don’t want to damage this perfect thing that I built,” because you realize you’re damaging it. Think of the second draft as a new thing that gets to pull from your first draft. You approach a new thing differently than a rewrite. By letting it be a new thing, it may be actually a little less scary for you. Craig: Yep, that may work. Basically, try anything you want and give yourself permission to suck. It might suck. That’s okay. Third draft is around the corner. John: We have a question on a different kind of paralysis. Here’s Richard. Let’s take a listen. Richard: Hello, guys. Richard here from the UK. I wanted to ask you something that seems to just steal so much time for me. I’ll set the scene if I can. You’ve made a really promising contact, and they’ve asked for some work, and you’re readying an email, a one-pager, and maybe even, say, a script. You reread your breezy yet professional email about 17 times, and then you worry that maybe the one-pager has got a typo, so you go through that a few times, and then the script, scanning for mistakes that may have eluded the 27 rewrites that you’ve already done. Then obviously, you better reread your email with fresh eyes, or maybe, oh, we should change that word. Then you think, oh, if I’ve spotted a mistake in the email, then maybe there’s one in the one-pager. Before you know it, four or five hours have just passed and it’s time to pick up the kids and start their dinner. Both of you have obviously had to send some super important emails to some super important people. Can you give me any advice on how to cut out this excruciating ordeal. Thanks, guys. You’re the best. Craig: We are the best. Thanks, Richard. I wonder how long Richard worked on this. John: Absolutely. How many times did Richard rerecord his question to us? Craig: Here’s some good news, Richard. Yes, we have certainly written our fair share of emails and documents and things. The fact is if you look at the emails you get back from these people, you will find all sorts of mistakes in their emails. You are dealing with an illusion that our minds create whereby all of our decisions are important. Emails are glanced through, scanned, sometimes barely. The documents that you send will have moments in them that make people sit forward and go, “I want to make this.” You can have an entire sentence missing. If it’s working for them, that’s okay. If you are riddled with spelling errors and typos and you’re actively putting forth the attitude of carelessness, that will call things into question. But ultimately, the quality of things is what matters. If you find yourself in a loop, just stop the loop and send the email. John: You’re in an anxiety trap. You’re anxious because you’re anxious. It feeds upon itself. It’s real. It’s natural. You gotta get out of it. What might help you out would be to literally set a timer for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever, and take a reasonable amount of time to reread the email, take one last look at the document you’re attaching. When the timer goes off, press send and walk away from your computer, because you’re not doing anybody any favors by obsessing over things that are not important and not worth obsessing over. Craig: There’s a feeling sometimes when you send these things. You’re about to hit send, and you think, “I’m sending you me.” You’re not. That’s the scary part is I’m sending you a document. I’m sending you an email. This is me to you. If there’s a flaw in it, there’s a flaw in me, and I will be rejected. None of that is true. It’s a way for us to imagine a control we do not have over people’s impressions of us. You could be given a year to perfect an email and a document in terms of editing, the surface editing you’re describing, and it would not change their opinion of you or the work in any significant way. John: For our Premium Members, we sometimes send out emails about live shows or other things coming up or Three Page Challenges. In Mailchimp, the service we use, there used to be this thing right before you sent the email. There’d be this animation of a big monkey finger, a sweaty monkey finger above this red button for pressing send. It’s very effective and really anxiety-producing, like, “Oh, shit. Is it really ready? Is there anything left to fix?” They got rid of that image, because I think they probably did some surveys and realized that’s actually making it worse for people. It’s too true to the experience. It no longer says that. Now you can send it out more willy-nilly and it doesn’t do that, freak you out. Craig: Do you really want to send this email? John: Really want to? Craig: I mean, I’m a monkey, but I’ve read it. Do you really want to send it? I mean, if you want to, but I wouldn’t. Richard, you’re gonna be all right. John: He’s gonna be fine. Let’s do our One Cool Things, Craig. My One Cool Thing is this artist named Lola Dupre. I have no knowledge of who she is. I just know her artwork is just so effing cool. I’ll put a link in the show notes to her archive, her gallery. She makes these portraits of animals and people that are collages, and so they’re distorted. It’s an image of a thing that’s just been distorted and pulled into different directions. They’re all really, really cool. Craig, you’re looking at this now too. Help me describe what you’re seeing. Craig: There are images of let’s say cats, and it’s somewhat caricatured, but most salient, the cats have 20 eyes or there are painted images of people and the length of the face is really distorted. One of these is wonderful. I might just get that. It’s an old-school Mac with a keyboard, but the keyboard has like a thousand buttons on it. This is amazing. I love that one. John: It’s all great. They’re done through collage. Basically, she’s starting with one original image, and then just by overlapping and overlapping, she’s distorting the dimensions of it in ways that are just really, really cool. It just made me happy to look at and just things I would love to have on my wall. Lola Dupre, an artist. We’ll put a link in the show notes to her shop and her gallery. Craig: Very cool. Looks like most of her stuff has been sold. You’re doing great, Lola. I have two One Cool Things, because sometimes I have none, so I’m trying to make up for it. First is Codenames Duet. We’ve talked about Codenames. John: Which I’ve played. It’s so much fun. Craig: It’s so much fun. Codenames Duet, I played with Melissa. If you just have two people, you can’t play against each other, of course. The idea is you both have the same board of words. You each have different words on that board you’re trying to clue to each other. You need to work cooperatively to get all the words uncovered by a certain number of turns. It’s a lot of fun. It’s a very clever way for two people to play Codenames, and it’s just as interesting. There’s something nice about the cooperative experience. As opposed to the, “I beat you,” it’s more like, “We beat it.” John: Now, Craig, we haven’t talked about the new Scrabble, and so all the controversy over, in Europe they came out with an alternate version of Scrabble, which is a cooperative game rather than a competitive game. There was all this Sturm und Drang about like, “Oh my god, they’ve ruined Scrabble.” But it actually reminds me of these cooperative games like Codenames Duet, where basically you’re trying to work together to get a thing done. Craig: I don’t know why people would be annoyed that there’s a version of Scrabble that people can play cooperatively. Who cares? Just play your regular Scrabble. It’s still there. It’s not a problem. I think sometimes people are just looking for stuff to get angry about. Scrabble is made by, what is it, Mattel? They’re a company. They’re trying to make money. Who cares? Do you know how many versions of Clue have been made? John: One or two. Craig: Yeah, like 400,000. My other One Cool Thing, I landed on this because I was talking with somebody about the Bible and weird Bible verses. I thought, “Oh, I bet you the internet has a great collection of weirdest Bible verses,” and they did. They had lots of them, but there was one that I loved so much that I need to read it. This is my new favorite Bible verse. This is from 2 Kings Chapter 2, Verse 23. “From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. ‘Get out of here, baldy!’ they said. ‘Get out of here, baldy!’ He turned around, looked at them, and called down a curse on them in the name of the Lord. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled 42 of the boys.” There’s so much going on here- John: There’s so much. Craig: … that I love. First of all, at first I was like, you can’t kill kids because they called you baldy, although I was not aware that people were yelling “baldy” back in, whatever, 300 BC, but fine. But then I was like, wait a second, 2 bears mauled 42 of the boys. That means there’s more than 42 boys. Now, that’s a riot. That’s 70 boys now following you screaming, “Get out of here, baldy!” I’m afraid. John: I don’t understand the bears’ agenda. It’s [crosstalk 01:04:16]. Craig: The bears don’t have an agenda. The bears have been sent by the Lord. But this is the next mind-blowing part. He only sent two bears. Two bears mauled 42 boys. That’s 21 boys per bear. Let’s say these bears are real quick. It takes maybe five seconds to fully maul a child. You got 21 of them. That’s almost a minute. After 30 seconds of watching your friends being torn apart by bears, how are you not running? John: Run away. Craig: Just run. Why only send two bears? Also, I like that there happen to be woods nearby, and also that the Lord was like, “Oh my god, no. You can’t call my guy baldy. Oh, bears, that’ll work.” Bears. John: Bears. Craig: It’s just such a great verse. “Get out of here, baldy!” John: I’m looking it up on Biblia, which is showing me the different translations of that same section, because I was wondering was baldy just one esoteric choice that one translator chose to make. But no, baldy is common in most of this. This is from the New International Readers version. It’s slightly different. “Elisha left Jericho, went up to Bethel. He was walking along the road. Some young fellows came out of the town. They made fun of him. ‘Go on up. You don’t even have hair on your head,’ they said. ‘Go on up. You don’t even have any hair on your head.’ He turned around and looked at them and he called down a curse on them. He did it in the name of the Lord. Then two bears came out of the woods. They attacked 42 of the young fellows.” It’s not just a weird translation. Craig: That’s what happened. That’s the story. John: That’s what happens. Craig: That is the full story of what happens when you start saying “baldy.” Is it possible that the two bears were just large, hairy gay men? Because now this is getting good. John: Now it makes more sense. Craig: Now this is getting good. John: Could they really maul these? Maybe they were carrying a maul. They were carrying a giant hammer. Craig: We know they’re big. We know they’re big guys. John: They’re big. They’re big guys. Craig: I just love this verse. I think it’s “baldy.” Ultimately, it’s just- John: “Baldy” is pretty great. Craig: That is a word that you’re not imagining people in the time before Christ or even shortly thereafter saying “baldy.” It’s so mean. As a bald person, I’m in love with this. John: I’m thinking of our D&D Zoom group and just how many bald heads there are. We would all be subject to these taunting youths. Craig: “Go away!” Why do they care? Why are they so mean? Anyway, they got what was coming to them. John: They do. That’s a lesson learned. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt- Craig: Baldy. John: … and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Craig: Baldy. John: Our outro this week is by Ben Singer. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to [email protected]. That’s also the place where you can send questions. We love when you send little audio clips, so keep doing that. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, 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. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to do about all of our digital stuff and what to do with it after we die. Craig and Drew, thanks so much for a fun show. Craig: Thank you. Drew: Bye, baldies. [Bonus Segment] John: Craig, so as we’ve established well on the show, you believe we’re living in a simulation, so therefore your death has no impact on you, because you’ll just return to the cloud. But your loved ones will still be around. Melissa will have to deal with, oh my god, all of Craig’s computers and stuff like that. Have you done anything to help her out in this situation, or, god forbid, you don’t die, but you’re in a coma, and she has to deal with that stuff, what are you doing to make her life better and easier? Craig: I have thought through all of this, and I think everybody should. Of course, Melissa and I have done some estate planning, which you do not need an estate to do. You just need something. You own a spoon, you can do estate planning. We have provisions should either one of us die or become incapacitated medically. Because I use 1Password, she has access to my 1Password, which means she has access to all of my passwords. If I drop dead, she can use that to basically get into any account that I’ve created and cancel them, or perhaps cause mayhem. John: Absolute mayhem. Craig: What about you? John: I had to deal with some of this when my mom died, because she was the last of that stuff. We had a bunch of her accounts and things like that. To her credit, she made good lists of where her physical bank accounts were and that kind of stuff, and I had to deal with all the closing off of her estate. For the digital stuff, because my mom was not technically all that sophisticated, I just had a list of all her passwords anyway, so I could get into her Gmail and all that stuff and deal with those situations that came up. With Mike and I, we have similar situations where that stuff is in 1Password and most stuff will be pretty easy to do. I was reading a blog post this last week that was talking about, it’s one thing to have all the accounts, but that doesn’t tell you what a person actually needs to do. This blog post is recommending a document that’s like, here’s how to be me, basically just talking through, like, this is all the stuff that I’m actually doing on a daily, weekly, monthly basis that’s keeping stuff going, because Mike is paying a bunch of our bills that I don’t really know about. Here’s where this thing is. This is the phone number for the tree guy, because I don’t know who that person is. That kind of stuff we haven’t done a great job of sharing, and we probably just need some sort of shared document for that. God forbid something happens to both me and Mike, because Amy has no idea where any of this stuff is kept. Craig: Yeah, that probably would be good to have somebody be able to provide her that. We have a trust set up. If the two of us go down, then there is an executor of the trust who has to operate with the fiduciary responsibility to the people who are assigned stuff, like our children. They would help them. That would be their gig. Part of the trust is making sure that those people are compensated fairly, so they’re not working for free. But yes, there are ways to make sure that your kids are helped. I never had this issue, because my mother is still alive, but my parents didn’t have really much in the way of assets for me to worry about. Same for my grandparents. I didn’t have to think about it, but certainly my children will. John: Drew is reminding us here in the Workflowy we did talk about some stuff on this area back in 594. Drew, remind us, what did we actually get into? Drew: We were talking more about what happens to the things you’ve written after you’ve died. We had a little bit of estate planning. That’s always good. John: In terms of the stuff we’ve written, I guess there’s all the things that I’m halfway through on. I have just a big Dropbox full of the finished projects and the stuff that was started that never got finished. I have a Notion database of my 36 projects that are in some form of active development in my brain. But that’s not gonna be so crucial. It’s worth something, but it’s not gonna be worth a lot. The Big Fish musical that I did with Andrew Lippa is an asset that I do control copyright on, and that will be a thing that my heirs will have to be thinking about and thinking about future productions and what changes they will allow to make to that down the road. But that’s not gonna be a, “Oh crap, in the next 24 hours, what stuff do I need to get done?” Craig: It is gonna become an issue going forward. There’s an entire generation of old people that are on Facebook, and no one knows their passwords for anything. They barely know their passwords for stuff. When they die, there are just gonna be all these just floating accounts of dead people just hanging out. John: Closing those accounts is an important thing too, or arguably, it’s an important thing. I think zombie stuff out there is gonna be bad. You don’t want people to be getting emails from dead people about stuff. There was a service – we’ll try to find a link to it – that basically checks in that you’re alive on a regular basis and then has a plan for if you don’t respond in a certain period of time, it starts closing things down, which could make sense. Craig: I think Facebook has a, “Hey, here’s a thing to fill out for when you die.” They’re aware of it. Probably costs them money. All these dead people hanging around on our Facebook. I’m sorry. Meta. John: Meta. Craig: Meta. John: But then I feel like in the not too distant future, we’re also gonna have to worry about, what about the AI versions of ourselves? Do we want to continue after we die versus not continue after we die? I think it was Laurie Anderson, the performance artist, was talking about, I don’t know if it was her husband or some other person, that she has basically an AI representation of their work as a chatbot. She finds it therapeutic to chat with this representation of a friend or husband or somebody. Yes, and also, should I have the ability to say no, you can’t do that? It’s weird. Craig: If they make an AI chatbot of me, it’s mostly just gonna be saying the following to people: Get out of here, baldy! John: With that, another Scriptnotes is resolved. Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Drew. Craig: Thanks, guys. Links: The Life and Death of Hollywood by Daniel Bessner for Harpers One weird trick for fixing Hollywood by Max Read Moloch Trap Lola Dupre Codenames Duet 2 Kings 2:23-24 Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt! Check out the Inneresting Newsletter Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription! Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter John on Mastodon Outro by Ben Singer (send us yours!) Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Email us at [email protected] You can download the episode here.The post Scriptnotes, Episode 642: It’s Brutal Out Here, Transcript first appeared on John August.

The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin. John: You are listening to Episode 641 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, what do your characters know, and how do we know if they know it? We’ll stare in the epistemological looking glass and offer some guidance on building characters who feel appropriately informed. We’ll also look at TV ad breaks and what they’ve become in the age of streaming shows that may or may not have predetermined act breaks. We’ll also answer some listener questions, and in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, what should you do when meeting a famous person, and what should you not do? Craig? Craig: I did not get the memo that we’re being British. John: We’re being very British on the podcast today for no good reason. Craig: I’ll do it for the entire time. Just curious why. John: Some mornings I wake up and I’m just channeling the spirit of Claire Foy. Claire Foy is still alive, and yet Claire Foy’s voice as the Queen in The Crown just seeps into my body, and I just want to channel that Claire Foy energy. Craig: We’re doing Received Pronunciation. That would be very, very appropriate. John: Extreme Received Pronunciation. Craig: Oh, so RP. We’re so RP, darling. John: So RP. It’s just fantastic. We’re not required to keep doing it, but it’s just fun sometimes to just be in that space- Craig: Absolutely. John: … be in that voice. I remember when I got to college, this young woman said, “What is your accent? I like it, but what is your accent?” I’d really had no idea, but later I realized it’s just closeted gay kid. That was my accent. Craig: Yes, there is a gay accent. John: Striving gay kid. Craig: Oh my god, that’s so specific. What a specific dialect. Striving gay kid. I like that. Did we talk about that documentary about gay voice? John: I think we did. Craig: It is interesting. It’s a thing. John: I think that documentary was Do I Sound Gay? Craig: Do I Sound Gay?, yeah, I think that’s what it was. But then there’s the RP version. Do I Sound Gay? Do I? John: Yeah, is it gay or British? It’s hard for people to distinguish at times. Craig: There are so many reasons that our British listeners are angry at us right now. I work with a lot of British people, like British actors who are doing American accents, like Bella Ramsey. We also have British directors. We’ll do our versions. “Here’s my London. Here’s my East London. Here’s my Northern England. Here’s my this.” There are people who are amazing at accents, there are people who are decent, and then there are people who are horrible. I was talking with Mark Mylod, incredible, multi-award-winning director. He said, “I can’t do the American accent. I can’t do it at all.” I’m like, “Oh, sure you can.” Have you heard when British people do a bad American accent? John: Oh, it’s so bad. Craig: It sort of sounds like this. This is how they do. I was like, “Oh, do it. It’ll probably be that.” He said something like, “I’m going to… ” It was like a monster. John: It’s because he’s trying to go rhotic. He’s trying to put his R’s back in, and that’s a way to do it. Craig: There’s an attitude, like (monstrous noises). I was weeping laughing, because it’s incredible. John: Amazing. Craig: It was incredible. Loved it. John: Loved it so much. I was talking to a dialect coach yesterday. He often works with actors who get the audition requests for, “Okay, you’re going in on this accent,” and they’re like, “Crap, I need to quickly get up to speed on that.” One of his frustrations, which I can totally understand, is that the breakdown will say New Jersey or Brooklyn or this thing, and that’s not actually a real thing. Basically, the New Jersey accent is an Italian American accent, so it’s not specific to New Jersey. It’s really specific to a cultural group. But they don’t want to say the cultural group, so they’ll put it on a region. People in Brooklyn don’t actually speak with that Brooklyn accent anymore. Craig: Not anymore. My parents did, and my mom still does. They’re not Italian. It’s a different vibe than the Sopranos style. There’s just a different kind of thing going on there. New Jersey has about 12 accents. The weirdest one, although probably the most common one, is the Bruce Springsteen, Central/Southern Jersey. It’s sort of Philly. It’s sort of country. It’s a weird one. It’s a really weird one. John: It’s a really weird one. Craig: We’re going down to get a hoagie. Anyway, that’s our show. John: That’s our show. It’s I think really good. As always, our show was produced by Drew Marquardt and- Craig: Drew Marquardt. John: Drew Marquardt and- Craig: Marquardt. John: … edited by Matthew Chilelli. Before we get to the wrap-up, we have some follow-up. In Episode 637, we talked about AI transcription and specifically we wondered whether our own transcriptions for our show, which we’ve done since the very beginning, were currently being done by a human or if they were just humanized versions of AI transcriptions. We have an answer. Drew, help us out. Drew Marquardt: Our very own transcriptionist, Dima Cass, wrote in, says, “Hey, y’all. I’m Dima, a real human, and I’ve been happily transcribing Scriptnotes for over two years, since Episode 536. I actually just hit 100 episodes. I transcribe everything from scratch as opposed to using any AI. I have, quote unquote, ‘humanized’ AI transcripts for other jobs, but I personally find it time-consuming and tedious. I imagine there would be a lot of editing involved if Scriptnotes used AI transcription, because John speaks rather quickly-” John: I do. Drew: “… almost blending words together sometimes, while Craig tends to make sound effects and use different accents.” Craig: Look who’s using different accents today, Dima. Drew: “You also often discuss pronunciation, which is sometimes a difficult thing to capture in written words.” Craig: Oh, boy. Drew: Which I’ll say Dima does a great job doing. “I’ve been doing transcription for a decade now, and AI has actually taken some of my jobs over the past year. The current trend is that entities will hire transcribers for half the price and have them touch up AI transcripts. It’s similar to what’s happening with script coverage work. “I know most people don’t enjoy transcribing, but I’m one of the strange few who does. I learn a lot and it fits my lifestyle as an introverted, neurodivergent queer person living in the Bible Belt. Thankfully there are still some fields of transcription in which humans are still preferred over AI, for instance in legal proceedings where every detail is very important.” John: That’s awesome. Craig: Then Dima sent a photo of themself “squinting in a huge field of tulips as further proof I am a human.” Yeah, Dima’s a human being. There’s a real Dima, unless AI… That does sound like an AI prompt, doesn’t it? John: I will say, this is Dima posing in this field of perfectly lit-up flowers. It could be an AI backdrop. Tell me that doesn’t look like it could be an AI backdrop. Craig: I just think, “Dall-E, create neurodivergent queer person in Bible Belt squinting, huge field of tulips.” I love the cardinal shirt. He’s got a shirt with a cardinal on it. Dima, thank you for doing this. It’s really nice to meet you. I’m very glad that you’re a human being. Look, let’s face it. Everybody knows that John makes the decisions around here, but to the extent that I get a vote, I vote that we never use AI and we always use a person to do this. John: Yeah, I think it’s great. There’s subtleties that a human being is gonna understand about what’s important and what’s not important. Dima does the transcripts. Drew reads through the transcripts to make sure they fit what we want, gets them posted up there. We started doing the transcripts early on just for accessibility, because we have folks who are deaf or hard of hearing and need to be able to read it. It’s better for them. But then other people who don’t have those conditions also benefit from the transcripts. And it also means we can Google search and find if we ever talked about the thing we’re thinking about talking about, because we probably did. So transcripts are good. Craig: I love the fact that we have transcripts. I myself would vastly prefer to read through a transcript than listen to a pod… Oh, god, look what I just did to Dima. “Listen to a pod,” and then I cut off the word “podcast.” I’m now thinking about Dima all the time. Also, I get to say Dima is wonderful. And now Dima gets to transcribe “Dima is wonderful.” Thank you, Dima. John: Good stuff. In Episode 637 we talked about gendered words in English. We had some feedback on that. Drew: Adam Pineless wrote in, “Another interesting gendered word like fiancé or divorcé is blond, because blond for men is spelled without an E.” John: That one I’m kind of willing to let go a bit, because it’s only when you’re using it as a noun that you do it that way. I get why it’s confusing for people to use it in English. It’s strange for us. Craig: “Blonde” to me is actually in the same category as fiancé and divorcé, and that is French words that are gendered. “Blonde” is a French word. I was actually talking about this with Melissa the other day. People have basically stopped using “fiancé” with the single E to describe a male betrothed. Everyone just uses the two E’s now. John: I see the opposite more often. Craig: Oh, sorry. You’re right, you’re right. It’s the other way around. It’s that there’s only one E, right? John: Yeah. Craig: No one uses two E’s. Sorry. That’s exactly right. No one uses the two E’s. There was an interesting case where I thought about the word “née.” N-E-E we will see as born as. John: Born as. Craig: Typically, it was used for a woman who had taken her husband’s last name. Melissa is Melissa Mazin née Frye, and it’s N-E-E with the accent on the first E. But you never see “ne,” N-E. But now you can, now that we have marriage between men. Mike August could be Mike August ne, N-E, and then whatever his last name was. But I have a feeling that we’re never gonna see N-E. John: I also haven’t heard people pronounce that aloud. But I bet there’s a whole generation of people who have seen that word but never pronounced it, and they’re gonna say née [nee], because we don’t know what to do with that thing. Craig: Now we have a new thing that we need to… Look, maybe we lost the battle of begging the question, but we will not lose the battle over ne. John: Of ne. Craig: Never. Nay! John: Never! Craig: Nay, I say. John: Craig, here’s a question for you. “She had blond hair.” Spell blond. Craig: In that case, I would use not an E. I would go blond without an E. John: I think that’s right. I think that most style guides will say that. Craig: “She is a blonde,” I would use an E. John: But should you even say “she is a blonde”? Craig: Why not? “She is a redhead. She is a blonde. She is a brunette.” I have no problem with that. There’s a word for this. Synecdoche, is that it, where you take a part of what someone is and use it to describe the whole? John: Charlie Kaufman could tell us that. Craig: Synecdoche, I’m looking it up now. “A figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole.” I guess, yes, a blonde. Or a metonymy. John: Fun. In Episode 635, you were talking about dialog and character voice, and we have feedback on that as well. Drew: Matt Yang King writes, “I loved your discussion on character voice, but I noticed you guys were missing a huge resource. One of the major websites I use when wearing my acting hat is the International Dialects of English Archive. It’s an incredible asset for anyone who wants to know the flow and cadence of various different languages and how they’re spoken in English. Also, it’s hugely helpful in building a real, grounded character. Every person who speaks into the archives speaks from a common script, so that you learn how they pronounce similar vowels and consonants, and then they give a little talk on who they are.” Craig: Wow. John: You’re absolutely right. This is by Paul Meier. If you’re gonna do any accent work, you’re probably gonna do any accent work, you’re probably gonna pick up his book, Accents and Dialects for Stage and Screen, which I was working through this last year when I was studying dialect and accents. Independently, I also learned how to write stuff in the IPA, which you’re gonna see in this book as well. Really, really useful. You wouldn’t want to stop at this website. You should go beyond that and look at YouTube and other places. But it is really handy that they are all speaking through the same script. You could get a sense of, like, oh, what does this person from Glasgow, what does it sound like when they’re speaking versus this person from Northern Ireland. It really is useful on that level. Craig: This site is really cool. Just looking through it, I picked Africa, and then I picked Cameroon. There are three different audio examples of people from Cameroon at different times – they even list the year – speaking English, so that you can zero in on accents that granularly, which I think is fantastic. John: Let’s take a listen to the first of these examples here. This is Cameroon 1. It’s a 32-year-old man from Kumba, Cameroon. Man From Cameroon: Well, here’s a story for you. Sarah Perry was a veterinary nurse who had been working daily at an old zoo in a deserted district of the territory, so she was very happy to start a new job at a superb private practice in North Square near the Duke Street Tower. John: Great. They’re gonna be reading through the same script. You heard him rolling his R’s. He had a trill on his R’s, which is really interesting. Craig: There is a specific thing going on there that is a little bit surprising to me. We do hear this kind of generic African English dialect, which that doesn’t sound far off from it, but there are very specific things going on. I thought it would be a little bit more French, more French-ish, because it’s Cameroon. But the point is, this is a great website. You can go and listen to all these things and avoid either just being wrong or being generic. John: The other thing I would recommend people take a listen to is Accent Tag, which is a series of YouTube videos. Basically, just follow the hashtag #accenttag, and it’s people who do read through a similar script, and then they talk about their lives a little bit. They’re reading through also how they pronounce certain words, which can be really funny just to hear how vastly different it is and sometimes how unaware they are about the choices that they’re making, because people say, “I don’t trill my R’s at all,” and of course they’re trilling every one of them. Craig: I’m gonna start trilling my- John: Trilling. Craig: Tapping the R’s. John: Little tap there. Great stuff. I encourage people to take a look at that. That is dialectsarchive.com. Craig: Very cool. John: Our main topic here, this was prompted by a couple different things that happened this past week. Before we hopped on the Zoom for D&D this week, we were talking with Kevin, our friend who was on Jeopardy. I wanted to know specifically, when he was ringing the buzzer, did he always know the answer to the question. Craig, what do you think? Did Kevin always know the answer as he buzzed in? Craig: I’m gonna say no. I’m gonna say yes and no. I’m gonna say that there was a part of his brain that knew that he knew the answer before the answer appeared, and that was the part of the brain that was buzzing in. And then there was a second for the answer to actually make its way from one section of the brain to the other. How close am I? John: I think that’s pretty close. He said he mostly knew the answer. But really, I think what was so fascinating about the conversation, it really came down to what does it even mean to know a thing. Are you buzzing because you know it or because you think you will know it in time? Kevin described situations where they record Jeopardy, and six months later it shows up on TV. He’s watching the episodes that he was in. A question would come up, and he wouldn’t know the answer, but then the Kevin who was on screen got the answer right. Craig: Whoa. John: What does it even mean to know the answer to something? It’s very situational sometimes. You’re in the moment and you know it in the moment, but you don’t know it beyond that. I liked that as one aspect of knowing a thing. But then also, during the D&D game, a thing happened which often happens in D&D, which is last week you encountered a new creature that none of you ever had seen before. It’s a Kruthik, and none of you had any idea what the hell this thing was. You asked, “Can I do a nature check to see if I know what this thing is?” And you rolled and you failed. You had no idea what it was. But then this past week, you encountered a troll. And you all know what a troll is, but would your characters know what a troll was? Again, we’re rolling dice to see do your characters know what this thing is and what its unique disadvantages are or abilities are. Craig: One of the things that DMs deal with – you’re DM-ing now, so you have to deal with it – is metagaming. We all know lots of stuff. You play lots of campaigns. You meet things. Since we’re not in a game right now, and I know a lot about D&D, when we encounter a troll, I, Craig, know that trolls regenerate health, unless they take acid or fire damage, in which case they don’t. But it’s really important then for fair play and for fun play to deny your character that knowledge. There’s no reason for a character that doesn’t know about trolls to think, “You know what I should do? I should throw fire at it.” But if you deal with a troll and you learn that, then yeah. We have to do the same thing when we’re writing. John: Yeah, that’s the point. Craig: We know everything. But what do our characters know, and what should they not know, and how did they learn it? And also, what’s the knowledge gap between what the audience knows about a character and what they know about themselves? John: Yeah, it’s tough, and it’s really like, what is the theory of knowledge that is informing the author, the piece, and the characters inside the piece, and the audience? There’s all these different things you’re trying to balance. You have no choice but to acknowledge the meta-game behind it all, because the audience is aware of things, because they’re aware of the genre, they have a sense of this, and they also have a theory of mind about what the characters inside this story should know or should not know. An example will be, I’ve seen things happen in movies where I as the audience know something, and suddenly this character knows this thing, but I know that they could not know that. There was no opportunity for them to have learned this fact. We’re willing to forgive that or it seems natural if some time has progressed. But there was never that moment. They never got that call from the other character telling them that thing, so how do they know that this thing is possible? Those are things that screenwriters are always, back of your mind, thinking about, wondering about. What do the characters know about what’s going on? Do they have a sense of what genre of movie that they’re in? These are all challenges. Craig: The converse is also a problem. I see this frequently, where you think, “Why are you willfully not knowing something?” It’s helpful, of course, to put obstacles in front of your characters, but if they are willfully not aware of something that they should be aware of because of what you’ve been watching, it’s incredibly frustrating. Similarly, it’s frustrating when characters withhold knowledge from each other for no reason whatsoever, other than that it will deny a scene from happening. If characters should be sharing information with each other, then they should share the information. I have a particular sore spot with characters saying the following cliched line: “I want to show you something.” “What?” “Just trust me.” And then they show them a thing that they could’ve just described or mentioned. They could’ve said, “By the way, you need to know that the dog next door has two heads.” “What?” “Yeah. Come on, follow me.” It’s a frustrating thing. As we often say, anything that makes the audience stop and notice that they’re in a movie is harming the illusion we are intending to create. John: The other vector we have to consider is, is this character specifically well informed about a subject or in general, because if so, we need to signal that pretty early on, or else it’s gonna be really frustrating when they suddenly have information, like, “How did they know this? I didn’t know that they were a doctor. I didn’t know that they were this kind of thing.” Or if they’re specifically uninformed, I think you need to clue that in to the audience quickly. A thing that occurred to me in the office yesterday is a character who doesn’t seem to know anything about dogs at all would be surprising. You say, “How old is your dog? How old do you think he is?” “I don’t know, 30.” That’s absurd. Any reasonable person should know that dogs do not live to be 30, but that could be a really good character moment, as long as we’ve established that it’s plausible this character is that dumb. Craig: If a character does say something like that, everyone should stop and say, “What?” and then grill that person on their stupidity, their weird knowledge gap. But you get one of those. You don’t get multiples, unless the point of the character is that they are absolutely idiotic. John: Drew brought up in the office yesterday a good corollary example, which is, in Top Gun: Maverick, Maverick is a Navy pilot, but he doesn’t know anything about boats, and so he’s on the sailboat and has no idea how to sail at all. That’s good. That’s funny. I get that. It’s surprising, and yet it made sense for the character, and it was a good moment in the story. Craig: Yeah. Navy pilots fly, and they land on boats, but they don’t sail, so that’s reasonable. That is a reasonable thing. It’s also a kind of thing that maybe some people wouldn’t necessarily be aware of, because they think of the Navy as boats, boats, boats. But yeah, I’d buy that completely. John: We’re coming up with characters who are gonna be in our story. We have to be thinking, okay, what do they know, what are their subject areas, and then within the story, how much information do they have that the audience also is right there with them and knows, versus they’re ahead of the audience or the audience is a little bit ahead of them. Finding that balance is really tough. There’s movies where characters know a lot more than the audience. Gone Girl comes to mind, where there’s a whole con being played on the audience, which is very important. But also Civil War, which I just saw this last week and really, really liked a lot, the characters in that movie know a lot more than the movie will ever tell us about what’s actually going on in the world. For me, it worked, because they’re not gonna talk about that stuff, because everybody around them knows it, so there’s no reason for them to discuss it. That was something that worked for me about that movie is they know really what happened that brought us to the Civil War, even though we as the audience never will. Craig: One of the worst phrases you type in a screenplay is “as you know.” John: Oh, god. Craig: If you know it, why are you saying it? There is an unspoken contract that there are things that we both know. Now, how we get that to the audience can be difficult. Let’s acknowledge that for a second. The reason that “as you know” came into being is because sometimes two characters who both know a thing need to impart that to the audience somehow. John: Now, Craig, I just want to point out, you just “as you know”-ed me to do that. Craig: As you know. John: As you know, as a screenwriter, but now we have to share it with the audience. Craig: We have to share it with the podcast audience, yes, as you know. Now, as we know… I like that. That’s fun. We meta “as we know”-ed. How do we do it? How do we get that information across? There are some good old-fashioned tips and tricks. The easiest and most obvious is bring a third party in who doesn’t know. There’s also a version where someone is saying, “Look, I went through the normal thing. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It didn’t work,” so that part of the way they’re imparting that information to their friend is, “It’s obvious to both of us, but the reason I’m running it down is because the outcome isn’t what we expected.” You have to come up with ways that feel naturalistic to share that information. John: Some cases, you will be able to just show it directly to the audience, just actually show the thing and cut away from the characters doing the thing and actually put that information out there so the audience directly knows the thing that the characters inside the world would know. That’s great when it works, but it may not be the right choice for your movie. Some movies cling very closely to their characters. The camera feels like it’s right over their shoulder the whole time, and it wouldn’t be appropriate to cut away to something else to give that piece of information. But other ones are jumping all over the place. If you’re doing The Big Short, you could jump all over the place, because that’s the style of the movie, and you can talk about a thing. You can talk directly to the audience about a thing if you want to, because that’s the rules you’ve established for your world. Craig: Yes. And even inside The Big Short, before they would get to the fourth wall breaking, where people would explain what a derivative was, you had Steve Carell’s character sitting with somebody, and he’s saying, “Okay, explain this to me, because I’m a finance guy, but this is a very specialized thing. You’re saying that blah blah blah blah blah?” And the guy’s like, “Yeah, and in fact, we then take these things and we repackage them into derivatives of derivatives.” And he’s like, “Wait, what?” And then you cut to somebody explaining. But you do have a character that we’re invested in who is asking questions and revealing that there are gaps in his knowledge, which makes sense, given what that story was, that people were literally finding out as this was happening, that these, I think, going to call them weapons of mass financial destruction had been created. John: We’re gonna go back to our probably most cliché phrase on this podcast: specificity. But I think you also look for what is the specific conversation that these characters would be having that would reveal to the audience the thing we need them to know but would actually be necessary for the conversation for them to be having to move forward to do the next thing. That’s actually moving the scene forward, but in the context of moving the scene forward, will also provide this explanation and give the audience the knowledge they need to have to go forward. Craig: That’s right. We have to think about how we do this on a day-to-day basis. There are times where you might say to somebody, “I arrested this guy. I brought him in. What do you think happened next?” And then the other character says A, B, C, D, and E. And the first guy says, A, B, C, D, and then not E, weirdly, H, because he’s setting this person up to make the story interesting, and in doing so, there’s our package of information. But it’s natural. We just have to make sure we don’t do that lazy thing of people just dumping information at us. And similarly, we can’t do the lazy thing where people are missing information. We’ve talked about the cellphone problem. If they had the information, now what? John: What should also be clear is that there’s times where you don’t need to see all the connections being done, because you feel like enough time has passed that it’s naturally going to happen. I think through Succession. In a given episode of Succession, sometimes they’re really tight and it’s almost real time, but sometimes we’re covering a period of a couple weeks, and then, yeah, those communications were had, but I didn’t see them. But I believe that Logan knows that this thing is happening. All those pieces were put together behind the scenes. If you trust in the storytelling enough, you’re not gonna worry about how did this person find out this thing, because they spoke it. It’s gonna get through. Craig: I have a personal thing. I don’t know. It’s part of my style, maybe. I don’t know. Part of my voice. But my thing is that there are times when people need to explain things to other people, and the best way to go about it is to just do it, to embrace the active explanation. We do explain things to each other all the time, so it’s okay, as long as the characters are acknowledging that that’s what’s happening. Part of the problem with an elegant exposition is that people try to make it elegant. But here’s the deal. It’s either don’t be elegant and just say, “I am now gonna explain something,” or be elegant and don’t enough notice that the explanation happened. But anywhere in the middle, lame. It just comes out lame. I personally have no problem embracing explanations. If you look at Chernobyl or if you look at The Last of Us, you’ll see scenes all the time where people are just saying, “Can you explain what happened?” and someone says, “Yes, here’s my… ” Now, explaining things is its own art. You have to be interesting when you explain things. The people who are explaining things have to be good at telling a story. That’s important. John: But Craig, the examples you’re making, like Chernobyl in particular, those explanations are germane, because those characters really would be explaining those things to the other people around them. They were actually necessary to do, so it doesn’t feel forced on. Where our concern is is when characters are explaining things that don’t need to be explained within context of the world, that they’re just there for the audience so that the audience can be up to speed. That’s the real challenge. That’s where you need to search for elegant ways to get that information out there. Craig: You need to be elegant. You can’t always have somebody explaining something. But when you have information that is actually interesting, then just do it, just explain it. John: Another thing I think is crucial about these explanation scenes, when it is a straightforward explanation, is it doesn’t mean that all conflict stops. There needs to be something else that’s happening and that’s not just we’re on all the same page together. There has to be some urgency that’s getting you through the scene. Otherwise, we’ll be informed but we’ll be bored. Craig: Correct. The scene must have a beginning and an end. And the beginning is not as important as the ending. The ending of these scenes cannot simply be, “All right. Now I know.” The ending of the scene needs to be personal. It needs to have some sense of a relationship. And it needs to explain why the information we received is relevant not only from a plot point of view but from a personal point of view. It must come back to the human being. Otherwise, it just floats there as info. John: Yeah. A show I liked a lot on Netflix this last year was The Diplomat. One of the things I enjoyed about it was that there were moments where you just had to explain things, but all the explanations came kind of in conflict, because there were competing ideas. You’re jostling for supremacy within them, and also a lot of interpersonal conflicts that were happening at the same time the explanations were coming out. And that made for good scene work. And it was a delight to see when that show was working so well. Craig: I love it. Personally, I love when information is relayed, and I’m excited and interested. I love The Big Short. I don’t understand money. I still don’t understand money. But I loved learning. Even if I have forgotten, I don’t think I could explain it as well as I could have, say, an hour after I saw the movie the first time. But while I was watching it, I was fascinated by it. When I watch shows of any genre where the information is revealed in fascinating ways and it seems like there’s craft and art to characters learning, explaining, and also when there’s a lovely and satisfying gap between what I know and what the character knows, whether it’s that I know more than the character knows about themselves, like, say, the movie In and Out, where we all know he’s gay from the start, but he just doesn’t get it yet, or when somebody knows way more than I do, like for instance, My Cousin Vinny. Marisa Tomei is on the stand, and she suddenly has this epiphany about the tire marks. And she’s like, “No. The defense’s argument is wrong.” Okay. She knows everything now. And Joe Pesci knows what she knows. And he’s like, “Really? Why do you think that?” And I’m like, “Okay, now they both know something.” And the gap between what they know and me not knowing is curiosity, and I’m leaning all the way forward knowing that I’m gonna be satisfied, which is wonderful. John: Let’s circle back to the troll problem, where the audience is ahead of the characters, where the audience knows how trolls work and the characters inside the story don’t. There can be frustration from the audience, like, “You dummy. This is the rules. You don’t have this. You don’t understand how vampires work,” or whatever. There’s a fundamental sort of disconnect there. To me, the crucial thing here is you need to establish your characters well in the world well enough that the audience is on board with understanding what the characters could know and could not know and that they’re on board the ride and they’re willing to turn off that part of their brain that is aware of the genre and the rules around the genre. Craig: It’s frustrating for us when we watch. It’s not necessary. There is a way to do it correctly. There are some television shows, I think because, specifically procedurals, they just don’t have the time sometimes. We’ve gotten more time as storytellers in television where you don’t have ad breaks. But good old-fashioned ad break television, like the kind you and I grew up with on the networks, they just didn’t have the time. They have to just dump the information out. It’s tricky. It’s also why you see procedurals that work in specified job areas are incredibly popular, because it allows them to say information that is specific, that we wouldn’t otherwise know. I don’t know necessarily why doctors are constantly explaining medicine to each other, but the fact that we don’t know any of it helps. John: Yeah, it does help a lot. You just mentioned ad breaks, which segues naturally to our next topic, which is that we’ve talked on the show before about shows that were written without act breaks, like Chernobyl, but now they have ads inserted into them, and those ads were inserted kind of randomly. There’s no plan for it, because you didn’t plan for a moment where this ad would go, which was so different than how we used to do television and still do television on a broadcast model, which is that you have acts that build up to rising tension, and at this moment of great tension, fade to black, a commercial goes in, you come back out of the act break, pick things up again and move on. That was a way we wrote television for 50 years, and now we don’t tend to do that very often. We’ve talked to writers who were doing spec pilots, like, “Are you putting act breaks in? Are you not putting act breaks in?” That’s a choice you make. This last week, I think it was Chris in our office, was talking about he was watching an old episode of The X-Files, which is a show that had act breaks in it. He was watching it on Prime. But they didn’t use the actual defined act breaks. They just inserted their ads kind of wherever, and it was really frustrating. Craig: Yes. I know that some of the stuff that I do for HBO does get chopped up and ad-breaked in other countries or in other services. I try to just not think about it. Then again, as film writers, you and I have dealing with this our whole lives, because traditionally, movies would eventually sell to broadcast or cable, where they would be chopped up and ads would be shoved in. John: Almost all the Bond movies I watched were on ABC, the Sunday before school started in the fall. I absolutely loved them, but they were full of random ad breaks. Craig: Full of random ad breaks. Now, my One Cool Thing this week, I won’t give it away, because I don’t want to give the audience too much information, but it is a show that has been made for a premium streamer, and that streamer now has options. You can either watch ad-free or not ad-free. Even though I’m watching ad-free, there are moments where the shows just cuts to black, and then, boop, we’re into the next scene, and it’s very clear that the way they built it was like, “We are picking the ad breaks.” You won’t have to watch ads when you watch it ad-free. But you’re gonna see the moments where the ads would go. You just don’t have to sit there for 15 or 30 seconds. John: But here is the question. Will those ads really go in those spots? Because that’s the issue. Are they keeping track of the metadata for where those things go? Because clearly, in X-Files, they were not. Oour own Drew Marquardt spent the afternoon yesterday looking through a bunch of shows to see which ones were actually inserting where the natural ad break would be and which ones were not looking for the act breaks at all. Drew, what did you find as you were scanning through stuff? Drew: It was a very scientific process. Prime it seemed like would have an act break at 19 minutes no matter what and 32 and a half minutes no matter what. But things like FreeV, which is also an Amazon service, would put act breaks where they were supposed to go, for both shows that they didn’t produce or ones that they did, and Peacock seemed to be pretty good about it too. Craig: I think that what’s going on is some sort of dictate that says ads must happen at a certain point or wherever, and we don’t care where the ads used to go. But when they are making their own shows, that dictate is certainly built in. There’s no chance that they’re making their own material with ad breaks that they’re gonna ignore. Those ad breaks are obviously designed by whatever algorithm runs the kingdom. John: I hope we’ll have some listeners who write in who actually have first-hand experience with how this works on the other side and will break whatever NDAs they’re gonna be breaking. My guess is that for a show like The X-Files, produced by Fox, for Fox, I think, Amazon licenses it, they get the video file. I wonder if they are not getting special metadata about where the actual act breaks are, that they could slot those things in, and they’re just putting it wherever, or they’re getting that metadata and saying, “Screw it. We don’t care. Our own internal metrics show that it’s most effective for us to put these commercials here and here and here, regardless of what the original plan was for the show.” Craig: I suspect it’s the latter. I remember my first internship in Hollywood was at Fox Network. When we would review the shows before they air, it was just clear. On the tape, every quarter inch, it would go to black, and then there was a second, and then it would come back. It’s pretty clear. I think that Amazon basically is like, “We can’t put as many ads in as network put in for whatever this medium tier is, and yes, our data says that people will deal with two ad breaks in this point and this point, and we’ll just shove them in there.” John: Obviously, YouTube works that way. If you don’t pay for YouTube Premium, it’s just shoving in wherever they want to put it in. I didn’t watch Mad Men on its original run, but my recollection of people talking about it was Matthew Weiner didn’t write act breaks at all, and the commercials would just show up where they showed up. Craig: It was on AMC. I didn’t watch it as it was airing either. I watched it after. So I don’t know the answer to that. John: I don’t know what the right answer, the right choice is here. Clearly, we’re in this transitional, frustrating moment where you don’t know as a show creator how much you should be planning for where those act breaks are gonna be, where the ads are gonna go, or just ignore it, and the algorithm’s gonna figure it out. And even if you got an answer from your executive, is that gonna really hold true when people are watching two years from now. Craig: I know that Max does have an ad-supported tier. No one has asked me. I know that much. Maybe they haven’t asked me because they know that I would be like, “Rah rah rah-” John: “Rah rah rah.” Craig: … and just be like, “Shove it anywhere. It doesn’t matter. You’re ruining it, so just ruin it however you want.” That is basically what I would say, so my guess is they just haven’t bothered asking. John: I think maybe you could just start putting digital logos on characters’ clothes, and it’s like NASCAR. Craig: I don’t know if this is real or not, but it was making the rounds on social media. It was an old broadcast of Star Wars. It was in, I think, Peru perhaps. They didn’t want to stop the show to do ads. So instead, when Obi-Wan reaches into his little footlocker to get Darth Vader’s lightsaber to give to Luke Skywalker, they just stop and cut to a cooler being opened with a bunch of beer in it, and they do a little beer ad. And then they go right back to him handing him the lightsaber, which is kind of incredible and horrible. John: Apparently, it was real. Craig: Oh my goodness. Really? John: We’ll find a link to the story about it. Craig: Incredible. It’s terrible, but also hysterical. John: Yeah, it’s good stuff. Let’s try to answer some listener questions. Drew, what do you have for us? Drew: Eerie Resemblance writes, “So a film recently came out featuring the same job as the industry I’m in and, arguably, what I do within that industry. The main character was also a woman in my industry, which is a big deal because we are still under-represented. Someone from the film reached out and invited some women from our field to watch a private screening about two months before the release. Turns out the main character and I share a lot of commonalities, including a very similar name, we work from the same company, and we are even from the same state. Also, I focus on the same issues as this main character was. “I was able to give feedback to the people contracted to show us the film. They said they would pass it on. But I’ve listened to y’all’s podcast long enough to know that two months before release is zero time to change anything or really take notes. I’m wondering if filmmakers actually take any of these notes when they do stuff like this, or was this just checking the box because we are three women who are in the same industry as the main character? And secondly, as I mentioned, the main character’s coincidences with me were eerie. But I’m giving the writer of the benefit of the doubt that it was just three crazy coincidences, and I found it kind of funny. “But my question is, do y’all think about the consequences of creating a character, especially in a story that’s highly traumatic, who’s very close to a real person? Obviously, you can’t worry about that all the time, but are there ethical considerations to think about when it comes to your research and how that character may psychologically affect that person or a small group of people that they’re based off of in real life. I’m actually really glad that I’ve been listening to this podcast before seeing this film, because I think if I hadn’t been, the movie would’ve messed with me a lot more.” John: So many good questions in here and issues that are brought up. I want to start first with what was the purpose of that screening, Craig. Why do you think she and the other people who do what her job is were invited to see that early screening? Craig: This feels like manipulative PR move. Eerie Resemblance, your gut is correct. If the movie is about to come out in two months, this is box checking. They’re not gonna be changing anything, unless there’s some very simple thing an ADR line would address. Otherwise, no, they’re looking basically for cover, to say, oh, we screened it for all these people, and they really enjoyed it. This feels like CYA stuff to me. John: I think their logic was probably – let’s say there’s 10 people who might have an opinion about this specific thing. If the movie comes out and they react really negatively to it, we’re gonna have to deal with that. But if we can sort of preempt that by showing it to them and getting them on our side to some degree, that’s gonna help them out. And so that’s probably why they were bringing you in. Craig: Yeah, I think it’s preemptive. Now, the other question is an interesting one. The fact is that, just as the birthday paradox, if you have, I think, 23 people, there’s more than a 50 percent chance that one of those people will have your exact same birthday. This is gonna happen. Eerie, the name was sort of close to your name. They were from the same state. They work for the same company. Once you’re working for the same company, the odds are you might be from a state like the one that the company’s in. Lots of names are similar. It was probably not intentional. In fact, it’s actually quite annoying how fussy lawyers can be when they say, “Oh, this is actually too close to this person.” Screenwriters and filmmakers are smart enough to know to not just try and duplicate another human into their script. They’re aware that there’s a legal problem on the other side. John: We can be more specific about that. At some point in the development process, the screenwriter’s gonna have to sign something that says, “These are not based on real people.” There’s gonna be some kind of contractor sign that’s making that clear. Or if they are, you’re gonna have to go through a lot more scrutiny on that. You’ve dealt with that in some of the stuff you worked on. In terms of names, that becomes a thing. One of the clearance reports they’re going through is they’re gonna look for the names of the characters in your story and the people who actually do that job in the real world. And this could’ve been flagged. This could’ve been a thing that was a concern. It’s not your exact name. We know a little more of the details. And it didn’t set off their alarm bells. But there have been times where I’ve had to change characters’ names because it was too similar to an actual real person who existed in the world. Craig: The thing about names is, if you name somebody Cassie, that is possibly close to Cathy, Catie, Cara, Carrie, Cass, Cat. Names don’t really mean much. If it’s not your name, it’s not your name. Even if it’s your first name and not your last name – and it wouldn’t be your first and last name – it just doesn’t really matter. The issue is, do we think about the consequences of creating a character who’s very close to a real person? I gotta be honest with you. No, because we’re trying not. The fact is, we’re not trying to be close to a real person, or we’re saying we are doing a dramatization of a real person. If we’re dramatizing a real person, then they’re out there, and they can complain, or maybe not. Maybe we bought the life rights. Maybe we haven’t. We’ll be accountable to that. But if we’re creating a fictional character that does a job in a certain way for a certain company, no, we’re not thinking, “Oh, what if there happens to be somebody that has a similar name that does this and works for that same company? What will the psychological impact be on that person?” No, I don’t think we do. Because what can we do, other than confining ourselves, out of hyper concern, because somebody at some point is gonna say, “Oh, that reminds me of me.” We’re writing people that are supposed to remind you of real human beings, just not specific ones. John: I would say I mostly agree with you. I think there are situations where even if you’re not thinking about the specific individual, you’re thinking about the people who are in that position and how the existence of your movie or TV show might negatively impact their ability to do the work they’re doing. Let’s say your show involved some NGO workers in Malawi and South Africa and portrayed them in a very negative light. That could be true, and it could be absolutely accurate within the course of your movie, but it could also make it very difficult for the people who are really doing that work to not be kind of painted by that brush, not in a legally difficult way, but in a… I don’t know. I think there’s some moral and ethical considerations you’d have there about are you making their ability to do their humanitarian work more difficult by your portrayal. Craig: If you’re portraying an organization that is clearly meant to be like another organization, and you are suggesting that that organization, even if it’s fictional in your movie, is corrupt or whatever, then yes, you can impact an organization. You have ethical obligations, I think, as a screenwriter. One of the things that I was worried about when I did Chernobyl was not coming off as an anti-nuclear-power show. That was not the purpose. In fact, it was important for me that the main character explained very clearly the difference between all of the nuclear reactors in the West and the one that they were using in Chernobyl, which was just wildly different and didn’t have a containment building around it, etc., because the fact is I support nuclear power. I don’t think the lesson there is no nuclear power. I think nuclear power is kind of essential if we’re gonna avoid continuing climate crisis. But I’ve said so. I made that as open of an opinion as I could. I still got a whole lot of crap from paid nuclear industry lobbyists who were super cranky. I don’t care about them. That’s their job. They’re paid to be cranky. But I felt like I fulfilled my obligation as a creator to at least not be wildly misunderstood. Yes, we do have to think about that. But an individual’s name, no. Somebody somewhere is gonna say, “Oh, that reminds me of me,” and there’s nothing we can do about that. John: Yeah, sounds good. Let’s try one more question. Drew: John in LA writes, “About four months ago, I met a producer who has worked in development at several big companies. Last month, she sent me a young adult novel that I really responded to. We’ve emailed and called several times about adaptation ideas. At the end of our last call, I asked her if she’d hire me to adapt the novel in full. She said yes and told me to, quote, start thinking about my contract. I’m not in the WGA. She has a new production company that is not yet a Guild signatory. Her intention is to become a signatory. Is it appropriate for me to ask if she’ll do the Guild paperwork so I can get a fair deal? I feel awkward making that ask.” John: You should not feel awkward. Craig: No. John: This producer has worked in Hollywood, has worked in this industry. Since their production company that’s not yet a signatory but is intended to become a signatory, guess what? They can become a signatory with your project. You can break that seal. Hurrah. Craig: I’m a little nervous here, John in LA, who’s writing about this, because the producer says her intention is to become a signatory. That’s a little nerve-wracking. Let’s make this easy for you. You shouldn’t have to ask anything, nor should you be thinking about your contract. Not only are you not in the WGA; you’re not a lawyer. What you need is a lawyer, and the lawyer can do all of this. Here’s the thing you need to be aware of, John in LA. It’s not as simple as saying, “I’m hiring a WGA writer, and I’m hiring them under a WGA deal because I’m a signatory.” To be a signatory to the Writers Guild, you need to prove a certain amount of financial security, such that you demonstrate that you are able to meet your obligations as a signatory, specifically paying out residuals. You can’t just say, “I’m a producer, and I’m gonna hire a WGA writer. Just give me some boilerplate WGA stuff and I’ll sign the thing and I’ll be a signatory.” It’s not that simple. It’s not that simple, because people have done that in the past and then just not paid. John: Yeah, reneged on it. Craig: Right, not fulfilled their obligations. You need a lawyer. The good news is she’s saying she wants to hire you. She’s saying she wants to be a signatory. The lawyer will get paid therefore. So you should find one that’s willing to paper this for you, and they can have that discussion with them. It’s as simple as that. If her intention is to become a signatory, she should begin doing so. That’s on her. John: It’s not an onerous process to become a signatory. I had to do it for my movie. It’s fine. Craig: Exactly. They ask you a bunch of questions. You show them some evidence. You sign a piece of paper. Voila. John: Exactly, because ultimately, when it comes to residuals and paying out stuff down the road, you’re basically having to guarantee that any future contracts that the thing is sold to will take care of the residual. It’s doable, and so this person can do it. It’s fine. Craig: It is fine and is doable. They just need to do it. If that’s her intention, she should convert her intention into reality, and your lawyer should be thinking about your contract, not you. You don’t do that. John: It’s time for our One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things this week. First off, it’s a Patreon but also a website called tacticalmap.com. For the DM-ing I’m doing right now for our group, we’re using Roll20, which we’ve talked about, which is basically a virtual tabletop that we’re all looking at the same thing. You need maps for that. Some really good maps I found that are inexpensive online are at tacticalmap.com. It’s a guy who just develops some really beautiful top-down maps of different scenarios. We have a cliffhanger going on right now where there’s a troll attack. There’s this great fort in the mountains. It was perfect. I got this map, threw it in there, put some trolls in there. We’ve got a party. I like tacticalmap.com. You can find these maps. Then my other one is a game that I wish we had played with you, Craig, while you were in town, because you would absolutely love this. It’s called Letter Jam. The concept behind this is, it’s a cooperative word game where you have a bunch of players around the table. Each of them has a letter on a stand in front of them, but they can’t see their own letter. They’re trying to work together to get through all of the words that are in front of them. They could say, “I can make a four-letter word using four player letters and this wildcard.” Then you’re going around the table. It’s who can make the biggest word and what that is, but without ever revealing that word. Then you are taking those clues on your little clue sheet, trying to figure out, like, what the hell is the letter in front of me. Its really smartly done. Craig: I see, I see. People are saying, “I can make this word.” You’re like, “Okay, that person said they can make this word. This person said they can make this word.” I’m learning who maybe has what letter- John: Exactly. Craig: … and who maybe doesn’t have what letter. That’s interesting. John: That person never says what that word is, but instead, they’re putting little tokens in front of different people’s spaces to show, this is letter 1, 2, 3. You can see the other stuff. You can never see what yours is. It’s really smartly done. Craig: Sort of like Cluedo but with letters. I like it. That sounds like a fun time. John: Letter Jam is a Czech game, but you can find it on Amazon and other places. We’ll put a link in the show notes for that. Craig: Fantastic. The Czechs make excellent games, like Codenames. John: Like Codenames. The same company that makes Codenames. Craig: Oh, there you go. They’re great. My One Cool Thing this week is the television show Fallout. Now you have the information. Fallout on Amazon. John: On Prime. Craig: On Prime. I loved it. I loved it from start to finish. It was so well done, I thought. A lot of the reviews for it would talk about The Last of Us and video game adaptations, and I wish they wouldn’t, because to me, it’s taking away, first of all, from what those folks did at Fallout, and saying, “Oh, this one’s also a video game.” It’s like, “Okay, and these two movies were both adapted from books. Let’s compare those.” There’s no point. It doesn’t matter. It’s a wildly different show, different tone. I played Fallout 3, New Vegas, 4, and I’m just a fan, a Fallout fan. I thought that they did a terrific job of adapting that in the way it should’ve been adapted. It was just a fun watch. It was well acted. Walt Goggins is terrific in it. It might not be for everyone. It’s an overtly kind of gory, kind of like that comedy gore, which is true to the game. I thought it was great. I just loved it from start to finish. They’ve been renewed for Season 2. Not at all surprised to see that. I look forward to that, I assume, in… It’s a massive show. I know what it takes to make a show this size. I think they probably are bigger, budget-wise, I think. I hope so, based on what I saw. It was like, oh my god, this is insane. John: But I saw they got their California tax incentive for Season 2, so they’ll be here, so that’ll be great. Craig: Maybe I’ll come visit the set if they invite me. I’m a fan. I really enjoyed the show a lot. John: That’s great to hear. It feels like the kind of show that my husband will not want to watch, so I think while he’s gone this weekend, I will burn through it myself. Craig: Now, I will say- John: You still would want to- Craig: You know what I’m gonna say. John: Yeah, you want it to be a weekly show. Craig: Not only do I want it to be a weekly show. This, of all shows- John: Of all shows should’ve been. Craig: … should’ve been a weekly show. Hey, Jeff Bezos, I know you listen to our show. He does not. That’s just stupid. I don’t know how else to put it. I wish there were a different way. John: He doesn’t even run Amazon Prime Video, but still, yeah. Craig: I don’t know who does. The most polite way I can say it is, it’s just fully stupid, because that show- John: The footprint is smaller than it should be. Craig: It’s so much smaller than it should be, and that show is such a “oh my god, I can’t wait to see what happens next” show, which is why you should make them wait. Make them wait a week. Then with, I think it’s eight episodes, you’d have a cultural conversation over two months. I’ll just keep pointing over to Shogun, which has one more episode to go. Tuesday, when this episode airs, that night will be the finale, the finale, the finale of Shogun. People have been talking about it for months, because it goes one a week via Hulu. There’s no reason for Fallout to be all at once. It just felt wasteful, like, I’m gonna cook you a week’s worth of food, and then you just throw it after, because you consumed it all too much. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want to maximize the discussion around something as good as Fallout that is so watchable and addictible – addictive. John: Addictive. Craig: Addictive. I said “addictible.” That’s not a word. John: Addictible, yeah. It could be. Craig: It shouldn’t be. John: The kids will make it a word. Craig: Damn kids. John: Damn kids. That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. Craig: Is it? John: It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Craig: Oh, dear. John: Our outro this week is by Nica Brooke. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to [email protected]. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re fantastic. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on what you should do when you meet a famous person. Craig: Oh, I thought you were gonna say what you should do when you get lots of emails from English people complaining. John: You can send those emails to [email protected]. Craig: Ask. John: Great. Craig: [email protected]. John: [email protected]. Thank you, Craig. Craig: Thank you. John: Thank you, Drew. Drew: Thanks, guys. [Bonus Segment] John: Craig, let’s talk through what a person should do when they meet a famous person. And by what you should do meeting a famous person, I don’t mean you or me, who actually have different contexts, but you’re an ordinary person. You meet a famous person. Let’s talk through the different contexts in which this might happen. First off, you were called into a meeting with a famous person, a famous actor, a famous director, producer, who cares. How do you acknowledge or not acknowledge the fame differential between you and that famous person? Craig: In the context of a professional meeting, you want to acknowledge it as little as possible, because you don’t want to seem like you don’t belong in the room. The tried and true method is to simply say, “I’m such a fan. It’s so lovely to meet you.” I do that with actors that I cast in the show that are famous and have done lots of things. It’s 99 percent of the time exactly true. And beyond that, you don’t want to go too much further, because at that point, you’re putting yourself in fan box as opposed to collaborator box. John: 100 percent. I had a meeting with Henry Cavill. He’s so charming and just so incredibly handsome, but if I were to acknowledge too much, like, oh, this famous person is two feet away from me, that’s not gonna be useful for the meeting. That’s just noise and buzz and it’s not on topic. Address it just the way Craig said. “Such a fan. It’s really good to meet you. I really liked this thing.” You can talk about other stuff. But don’t talk about, like, “What’s it like being famous?” Craig: They don’t necessarily want to listen to that. Hopefully, if it’s a professional context, they’re also familiar with you and some of the things you’ve done. There may be a polite exchange of, “I really love this. I really like this.” The other thing that you don’t want to do in a professional context is try. This is pretty common. For any human being, when you meet somebody famous, there’s gonna be a natural instinct to try. You’re gonna want to impress them. You’re gonna want to make them laugh. You’re gonna want to make them like you. You’re gonna want them to be your friend, because they’re famous and they have this distortion field around them that’s so fascinating. Don’t do that, because what will end up happening is either faceplanting or just inauthenticity. It’s a bit sweaty. The hardest advice and the most common advice is to just be yourself. Unfortunately, in this situation, you must just be yourself. John: I would say don’t try to match their energy, their accent, because again, they have a gravitational pull sometimes, and it can be really natural to do that. No, you’re there to be yourself and to do your thing. Don’t try to get there. I had an actor camp coming in. I was gonna come in to do a rewrite on a project, and he was just bouncing off the walls. I didn’t react to how hyper he was. I was just back to focus on, like, “This is what I want to do. This is how we can do this. I hear why that’s important to you, and here’s a way we can achieve that.” You can validate all you want, but don’t try to match them at their energy, because that’s not your job. Craig: It’s not. Also, don’t give away your authority. You’re in the room for a reason. You know something. You do a job they don’t do. You have value. Don’t give it away. You don’t have to be a pompous jerk about it. You don’t have to be arrogant. But it’s all right for you to have opinions. It’s all right for you to say, “Yes. However, one of the things I’ve learned is blah.” You are allowed to be valuable. You’re not there simply to go, “Oh my god, that’s so great. Oh my god, you’re so awesome. Oh my god, everything you say is right.” It’s not. It’s not. They’re just people. They’re just people, especially in that context. You must people-ify these individuals that prior to that meeting were godlike to you because they were on screen. John: Back in the time when you and me both used to do more emergency work or coming in to help out on troubled things, I really felt like a lot of times the reason I got hired is I could survive in those rooms, that I could actually do my job in the presence of just a lot of chaotic energy and big egos and things. I could navigate my way through that. You get better at that by just meeting more famous, powerful people and not being swept away by them. Craig: Correct. There’s another skill involved in those situations where you need to make your way through a meeting with that person, giving them some kind of comfort, and then separately talking with the adults and saying, “Okay. Now, what do we need, and how much of that do you want?” Navigating that is a very difficult thing to do. But it is important, because ultimately, a lot of these famous people need to be happy. If it’s fixit stuff, it’s fair to say no one’s happy. Everyone is feeling wanting. How do you satisfy everybody somehow? Look, you can piss off the head of a studio. They can stop talking to you for three weeks. But if you piss off – I don’t know, I’m just gonna pick somebody. You’ve come in to fix a Thor movie and you’ve pissed off Chris Hemsworth, you’re fired, because he’s the one who’s showing up on screen. You can’t lose that piece. That’s the additional political power that these folks have just by dint of the job they do. John: Let’s talk a different context. It’s not a meeting, but you just saw their show, you saw their movie, or you’re backstage at their theater performance. How do you interact with that person in those moments? Craig: Keep it short. Keep it simple. And keep your expectations to zero. Your expectations should simply be shake their hand, tell them how great they did, say one quick thing. If you want a photo, they’re so used to that. And always ask, “Is it okay if I take a picture with you?” They’ll be happy to take a picture with you, because most of the time, backstage is when that’s supposed to happen. That’s sort of the deal. And also, it means this interaction is about to end. You and I have had these. We’re not famous-famous, but people know us from the things we do and from this podcast. When there is, either it’s at a live show or let’s say you’re just at a restaurant and somebody notices you and they are a big fan of you, when they say, “Can I get a photo?” in my mind I’m like, A, yes, and B, we have concluded this interaction and I can go back to whatever I’m doing. That’s a good thing. If you go too long, I don’t know, more than 15, 20 seconds, it becomes an imposition. John: I would differentiate the backstage of the show versus out at a restaurant. If you can find a moment in a public space where you feel like you can grab the person without breaking their world, that’s great, but I’d say don’t – I don’t know, I don’t want to blanket recommendation to never come up to the table, but kind of never come up to the table. Craig: I wouldn’t say come up to the table. If they’re having dinner, leave them be. But when they’re leaving- John: Waiting for the valet, waiting for [crosstalk 01:05:57]. Craig: … waiting for the valet, those are perfectly fine moments, because the other thing is, if you just imagine yourself in their shoes, if you’re in the middle of dinner, you’re in the middle. That means somebody comes up, talks to you, goes back and sits down, and now they’re over there, and now you’re aware that they’re there. Other people might take this as an opportunity for them to come up. Leave famous people alone when they’re clearly in the middle of conversations, dinner, etc., working. But when it is a little breather moment, like leaving, then sure. Just always be polite if you can. John: This last week after seeing Civil War, I was walking back to the car, and a listener of the podcast stopped me to say, “Oh hey, I really liked the show.” That was great. It was lovely. It was a brief conversation. Completely 100 percent appropriate. Craig: Oh, of course. Look, there are actors who are infamous for being super grouchy about this. I don’t begrudge them their grouchiness. It’s just like, hey, did no one tell you that being famous would mean you’d be famous? Most famous people I know are perfectly fine and gracious with those interactions. There are ways that they mitigate some of these things. Every now and then, I’ll go catch a Dodger game with Jason Bateman. When it’s time to leave the game, nobody walks faster and with more purpose than Jason Bateman leaving Dodger Stadium. It’s because there are sometimes upwards of 50,000 people there. At least, I don’t know, 30 percent of them are like, “That’s Jason Bateman.” If you’re walking real fast, people will go like, “Oh, Jason.” He’s like, “Hey,” and then he keeps walking, and so there’s no chance to get stopped and mobbed. That’s reasonable. But if somebody were to walk over to him when he’s sitting there and say, “Hey, my son’s a big fan. Would you sign this?” yeah, of course. John: Dodgers Stadium, the equivalent for us is Austin during the film festival, where I do need to walk pretty quickly and with laser-focused eyes, because otherwise I just won’t ever make it to my destination. Craig: There was one year, I think it was the last time I was in Austin, I got off the plane. I landed in Austin, got off the plane, emerged from the jetway into the airport, and within three seconds, I heard someone say my name to another person. I was like, “Ah, shit.” The thing is, listen, of course, it’s a nice thing when people know you and like you. But if you feel like, uh-oh, it’s gonna be a lot of this, it does become a little bit like… I’m not built for it necessarily. I’m always nice. I’m never a jerk, ever, ever, ever. But if somebody could say, “Hey, here’s a potion you could drink when you’re at the Austin Film Festival and you’ll be invisible for the next three hours,” oh my god, I would pay a lot. John: Love it. Craig: I’d pay money. John: Another context, a social event. Actually, there’s two different levels of this. There’s a social event which is the bigger social event, where there’s a lot of people mingling around, it’s a cocktail-y party kind of thing, or an after-screening kind of thing, where there’s a famous person there and you’re kind of introduced. Do you acknowledge how famous the other person is? A lot of it, you can do the – it’s like a meeting thing, where it’s just like, “I love doing this thing.” But other times, it can be weird. You’re folded into a conversation with somebody who’s much more famous. Do I acknowledge, like, “Oh my god, you’re Amy Poehler.” Craig: This is an example of a moment like that that I had. Normally, when I walk away from moments like that, I think to myself, I screwed it up. In this one, I thought, “Nailed it,” because it was so honest. I was at the Golden Globes. It was before the show started. I was talking to Kevin Huvane, one of the guys that runs CAA, and we were by the bathrooms. And he said, “Oh, I’m waiting here for Meryl Streep.” I was like, “Oh my god.” He’s like, “You want to meet her?” I’m like, “Meryl Streep? I would love to meet her.” She came out. He’s like, “Oh, Meryl, this is Craig Mazin.” I shook her hand. This is what I did. I went, “You know.” And she said, “I know.” I was like, okay, well, there you go, because she’s heard it a billion times. I didn’t want to say it all to her, but also, I wanted her to know, like, “I love you and I love everything you’re in and you’re amazing. You’re the greatest actor of your generation. Here’s the whole thing.” I think I could boil it down to just, you are aware of what’s happening in my brain. She was so nice and gracious about it. John: That’s great. Craig: It was the perfect length. It was a good old-fashioned 15-second chitchat, and that was the end of that. John: What’s great about that example is Kevin Huvane could be the hinge that introduced the two of you, and that makes things much more natural. If she was 10 feet away, would you have gone up to say anything? Craig: Oh my gosh. Now I’ll tell you when I blew it. This is so long ago. This was like 1992. I was with a friend. Is Johnny Rockets still there on La Cienega? John: No, it’s not, alas. Craig: It was an old burger joint across from the Beverly Center. We were there. It was, I don’t know, 8:00 p.m. or something sort of late. My friend – and we were sitting outside – he goes, “Look who’s over there. It’s Seinfeld.” It was Jerry Seinfeld. He was talking to someone else. They were having dinner. I was like, “Oh my god, oh my god, Jerry Seinfeld.” When we were done, we’re walking by, and I was like, “I’m not gonna do it. I’m not gonna say anything.” I had already passed him by two steps when I just was like, “No, I must.” I turned around and then went back towards him. I’m sure he thought, like, “Oh shit, I’m getting assassinated.” I was just like, “Oh, hi. Just a big fan.” He was like, “Oh, great.” Then I walked away. My friend was like, “That was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. He must’ve shit his pants, because you looked like you were coming back to throw a punch at him.” But I was so nervous and awkward about it. That said, sometimes – and you’ve probably felt this, John, maybe at Austin, where people come up to you and you can see how nervous they are to talk to you. It’s adorable, actually. It’s kind of sweet. John: You immediately do the thing to put them at ease and make you feel okay about the whole thing. Craig: Exactly. Everybody has these moments with famous people where they just fall apart, forget themselves, regress to childhood, feel like an idiot. That’s also fine and normal. If you can see that they’re like eh, just thank them for meeting them and leave. Don’t push it. I’m sorry, Jerry Seinfeld. I’ve never met him since. I’ve never met him. We’ve talked to Julia Louis-Dreyfus on our show, and I know Jason Alexander. These are lovely people. I’m at a different time in my life. I’m very comfortable around these people. But I still feel like if I were to meet Jerry Seinfeld today, I would have to say, “I need to take you back to 1992 and apologize.” John: Example just from this last week. We were at the WGA Awards. Craig, congratulations on your WGA Award- Craig: Oh, thank you. John: … for Best New Series, which is terrific. At the after-party thing, Quinta Brunson was like three feet away from me, talking with other people. And I was talking with other people. But I didn’t know whether to say hi to Quinta, because she came on the podcast, but it was just a one-time thing. I don’t know that she really remembers who I am out of this context. Of course, there’s a disparity, because she’s just much more famous. I know her because she’s a very successful creator and star of a thing. I did not end up saying hi, and I had an opportunity, because a friend of mine was talking with her, and I could’ve worked my way back in, but you don’t always have to take advantage of those opportunities. Craig: No. John: Nothing good would’ve happened. Craig: If you have nothing to say… I had met Quinta before, through Natasha Lyonne. Then we had her on the show. Now we sort of know each other. Melissa and I were both just wiped out, so we just went home. But if I had gone to that party and I had seen Quinta there, my guess is I probably would’ve just waved and then just kept going, because I don’t have anything specifically to say other than, “Hey, we know each other.” John: Exactly. Craig: Yes, and? John: Yeah. There’s that. Craig, as a famous person I get to do a podcast with every week, always a pleasure. Craig: Famous, quote unquote. John: Quote unquote, famous. Craig: Thanks, John. John: Thanks. Bye. Links: Do I Sound Gay? Documentary International Dialects of English Archive Accent Tag on YouTube Chilean beer ads in Star Wars Letter Jam TacticalMap Fallout on Prime Video Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt! Check out the Inneresting Newsletter Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription! Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter John on Mastodon Outro by Nica Brooke (send us yours!) Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Email us at [email protected] You can download the episode here.The post Scriptnotes, Episode 641: What Characters Know, Transcript first appeared on John August.

The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it. Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 633 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Any screenwriter who’s been working for a few years likely has projects that have stalled out or otherwise gone dormant. Today on the show, what happens when you revive one of those projects and actually get it made 20 years later. We’ll talk with a writer who’s done just that. John Gatins is a screenwriter and producer whose credits include Coach Carter, Dreamer, Real Steel, Power Rangers, and Flight, for which he received the Academy Award nomination. He’s also an actor you can see in movies including The Nines. Welcome, John Gatins. John Gatins: Thank you. John August: This is not your first time on Scriptnotes. We often see you and hear you at our live shows, because you are the person who is introducing us to Hollywood Heart, a fantastic charity. John Gatins: I thank you both, all of you. You’ve done such great things for us and that really cool, cool, cool organization. John August: We love doing our live shows with you guys, so thank you for that. John Gatins: Of course. John August: We’re not here to talk about those organizations today. We’re going to instead talk about your new movie, Little Wing, which kind of falls into a general genre I’d also love to talk with you about, which is sports movies or sports competition kinds of movies, because you have quite a few of those on your resume. I want to talk about how we construct and execute sports movies. Then we’ll also answer some listener questions about compartmentalization, mid-credit scenes, work ethics. And in our Bonus Segment for Premium members, kind of a grab bag. After a long solo career, you’re starting to work with a partner now, so I want to talk about the shift of partners. You’re also one of the people I think who is smartest and savviest about figuring out credits. When there’s a bunch of writers who have worked on a movie together, you are the person who figures out, “Hey, can we all figure out a good deal on this?” I want to talk through that process with you. John Gatins: Sure. John August: Cool. John Gatins: Great. John August: We’ll start with some news. John Gatins, have you ever heard this term? This came to me in an email I got from one of my agents, talking about what this one studio was looking for. One of the terms was “bro soaps.” What do you think a bro soap is? John Gatins: A bro soap? John August: Uh-huh. John Gatins: I don’t know. It’s a two-handed movie with two guys who are endeavoring to do something. I failed, right? John August: It’s a series. They’re looking at it like a soap opera. The definition in this email was, “A muscular drama that appeals to men.” Sons of Anarchy. John Gatins: Would Suits be a bro soap? John August: Yeah, exactly. John Gatins: Because those two guys are kind of in love with each other. John August: Yeah, I think that would be a bro soap. I think it’s not so specifically broey. Sons of Anarchy is broey. John Gatins: That show I don’t know. John August: Or Ray Donovan. It’s very masculine energy. Drew, we have some follow-up. Drew Marquardt: We do. Last week, John, you had the flu. You were saying we don’t have flu tests in the U.S. Travis wrote in to say at-home flu tests are available in the USA. Lucira by Pfizer is the one that is available. They’re about $50 each. John August: I looked at this one. John, do you remember early on in the pandemic, we had those at-home tests, and some of them were electronic, or sort of electronic, where you’d put the little sample, and you’d put it into a base, and then it gave a red or a green light? Do you remember any of those? Did you ever do any of those? John Gatins: I don’t. I don’t remember. John August: It was a thing that was happening for a while. This looks like one of those. It’s great that it exists. It’s 50 bucks, which is really expensive for an at-home test. It also just feels like so much extra waste to do this electronic thing, because it should just be… We know how to do a test now. You just stick the little thing in. You look for the little lines. Apparently, these electronic ones, they really are just creating a line. They have a little sensor that reads whether the line is there or not. I’m glad this exists, I guess, but I want those cheap European tests that you swab and you see, do I have the flu, do I have COVID, do I have RSV. That’s what I want. John Gatins: Look. I had COVID before anybody. John August: You’ve always been a pioneer. John Gatins: I had COVID, didn’t know it. Nobody knew what COVID was. It was the sickest I’ve ever been. I had a night in my kitchen by myself at 4:00 in the morning where I had a 105 fever. I was like, “I might need to call 911. I just don’t know what’s wrong with me.” Then I recovered slowly. Then I started reading about the symptoms when it was finally a thing. Then my doc said, “Does anybody want a test for the antibodies?” I said, “I do.” Ling was like, “You’re nuts.” I was like, “I’m telling you I had this.” He was like, “I’ve tested so many people. You’re the one guy with antibodies, so you’ve had it.” John August: I’d never had the flu as an adult until this last week, and it was the sickest I’ve been. John Gatins: The flu is no joke. Flu kills lots of people, friends. John August: It does kill a lot of people. It was bad. I had, again, a 105 fever. It was like, “Do I go to the emergency room?” John Gatins: I know. I was literally googling “dangerous fever for old men.” John August: We’re both alive to talk about it, so that’s the real victory. More follow-up on the Tiffany Problem. Explanation, Tiffany Problem is that Tiffany was actually a pretty common old name, but if you’d name a character in a period movie Tiffany, everyone’s like, “That feels wrong.” John Gatins: Really? John August: Yeah. John Gatins: Why? Because they think of the pop star? John August: It seems like a modern name, but it’s actually an old name. Drew: It goes back to the medieval times. Jake from Pandora wrote in to say, “I’m a VFX artist on the Avatar sequels over at Lightstorm Entertainment, which P.S., we just voted to unionize.” John August: Congratulations. Drew: “A major problem we face is that on Pandora, gravity is two thirds of Earth’s gravity. Presumably, this was decided to make an 8 to 10-foot-tall Na’vi seemingly move as a human does, so our perception of physics would be similar to that on Earth. But the Tiffany Problem of it all is that if we show someone jumping, it looks like they’re floating, if we multiply gravity times 0.667, which is the correct math according to Jim and the Oscar winners. Also, fires, water, and basically all physics simulations look fake at two thirds gravity. This would make absolutely everything we perceive to be so different, more so than a casual moviegoer would realize.” John August: That’s a great point. You want to be realistic and truthful as much as you can in a movie and follow the rules of the world that you’re setting, but sometimes you have to bend those rules, because otherwise it just doesn’t seem plausible. John Gatins: I remember working on Behind Enemy Lines, and we had a retired admiral. We kept trying to do things in the script that were like, “The master sergeant comes in and says this to the… ” It’s like, “He would never say… That just doesn’t happen.” We’re like, “It has to happen, because we need a problem in the movie.” It’s like, “No, that just doesn’t… They would never say that to that guy.” He was like, “That’s so disrespectful.” It’s like, “We’re going to have to though.” John August: I remember calling Jack Warner, the dinosaur expert for the Jurassic Park movies. I needed to say, “Could this thing plausibly do this?” This point, it’s a couple of movies. It’s like, “I’d say that’s plausible. I think it’s defensible that this thing could happen.” You reach a point where it’s like, okay, I can understand that this feels right within the context of this movie, whether it’s actually supported by- John Gatins: Berloff and I are working on a black hole movie, and we talked to this black hole scientist, and we pitched them a bunch of things, until we got to, “But you’re saying there’s a… I mean, you could.” He was like, “I guess.” You just look for one kernel of some sort of scientist tiny little something to hang onto and be like, “That’s the thing.” John August: Going back to Pandora and the Avatar movies, literally, they’re after unobtainium. There are moments there which are clearly fantasy moments, which give them latitude to do some things that are useful for what they need to do. Finally, my favorite kind of follow-up is Arlo Finch follow-up. Drew: Yes. Ethan wrote, “Couldn’t help but write in when I heard you and Craig talking about Arlo Finch the dog. My dear cat and erstwhile writing companion is named Arlo after Arlo Finch. His shelter name was Largo, which is not his personality, so that had to go. We adopted him in October 2017, and at that time, John had mentioned working on the Arlo Finch novels, and I loved the name. Something about it is adventurous and a touch anachronistic. As you mentioned, it’s also an easy name to howl across the apartment to get his attention.” John August: We have a picture here of Arlo Finch the cat. So handsome. Look at this cat. John Gatins: That’s a handsome cat. John August: That’s a handsome cat. I’m not even a huge cat person, but I would say that’s a handsome cat. Then we were also talking about two-syllable dog names, because the best dog names are two syllables, and for reasons we’re going to get into in this email. Drew: Chris writes, “Listening to you mention dog names generally being two syllables struck a chord. When I was a child, my father was a breeder of German shepherds. I always remember him saying that whether you were naming a dog or a child, the name had to yell good. English wasn’t his first language. I definitely took that into consideration when naming my kids Marcus and Ian.” John Gatins: We have two dogs, named Riri and Farley. John August: Exactly, you can yell. John Gatins: We can yell those. They get that. John August: Arlo. It yells out well. It’s a good dog name, a good kid name. John Gatins, talk to us about why you’re here. I want to get into a general sense of reviving old projects and what that’s like. Before we get into yours specifically, Drew has been doing research here. A bunch of recent movies are actually really old scripts that have been rejuvenated. Drive Away Dolls, the new Ethan Cohen movie, is an old script. Mad Max: Fury Road sat around for a long time. Unforgiven notoriously sat around for 20 years. Dallas Buyers Club. Beau is Afraid. A lot of times, things will sit around. John Gatins: I’m going to ask you this question, but I’ll share this first. I can’t think of a movie that I’ve worked on, that got made, that didn’t take… I can’t even think of the fastest one, because I don’t think it’s inside five years, to be honest. John August: The rare exceptions would be things where it felt like there was just huge movement towards… The Charlie’s Angels movies happened pretty quickly. But yeah, in most cases, stuff did take a long- John Gatins: Stuff takes a long time. John August: Yeah, but there’s a difference between stuff takes a long time, it’s slowly churning along, to there was no movement and then you came in with EMT paddles and zapped it back into life, which sounds like what happened to Little Wing. Can you give us the backstory on Little Wing? John Gatins: Yeah. In around 2004, I wrote and directed a movie for Dreamworks called Dreamer. Dakota Fanning, Kurt Russell horse-racing movie. I had a great experience at Dreamworks. They were so cool and collaborative. It was great to have a studio run by Stacy Snyder and Steven Spielberg, who’s a filmmaker. It’s like a different thing, because when he says things to you, what he’s saying, it’s like, “Hey, I’d do this,” and so it’s a little bit different. It was interesting, because I really liked working there. It’s a cool little campus. You know it. They have lunch every day in a courtyard. It’s just collegial and kind of fun. I got this call from my agent that said, “Steven wants to send you this article that he bought, that he loves, called Little Wing.” Susan Orlean wrote this really beautiful piece for the New Yorker. As you know, she wrote The Orchid Thief, which became adaptation, which is famously about someone trying to adapt a book that they don’t know how to adapt. They wrote a script about how, “I don’t know how to adapt this movie,” which was brilliant. And it’s such a cool movie. I thought that was kind of funny. I read the article. It was great. It was about her when she was spending time in Boston and walking her dog at this dog park. She encountered this girl, who was a 12-year-old girl who had racing pigeons, which she just thought was fascinating. So she befriended the girl and her mom and had this relationship, and she wrote this really elegant piece about it. Steven, it just really struck him. So I get called to Steven’s office. I’m like, “Oh, cool.” I go up there. It’s so cool to sit in his office. John August: I have been in his office. Yeah, for sure. John Gatins: He has the Rosebud sled in a Lucite box on his wall. There’s a Norman Rockwell painting. It’s incredible. You’re just mesmerized. You’re in this thing. Steven was so chatty and fun. Dakota Fanning was in my movie, but I had to go to five-day weeks with her, to get her out in time to go do War of the Worlds. We were sharing this actor, and it was just kind of interesting. He was watching all my dailies and everything else. We talked about his movie. We talked about my movie. John August: That’s so great. John Gatins: They’re both kind of 9/11 movies. We had this whole connective, great, soulful chat. Then he starts talking about the article. I was like, “Yeah, so I was thinking, the article’s amazing, but I don’t know what a movie is based on this. I have no idea.” I left the meeting feeling like, oh my god, I had this great time I got to spend with Steven Spielberg, and I’ll tell this story forever, and blah blah blah, and that’s that. I get to my car. My agent calls and says, “Look, they’re making this deal.” I was like, “What deal?” She was like, “Steven really wants you to write the movie.” I was like, “What is the movie? I don’t know what the… ” But then how do you say no to the guy and his partner, Stacy, who let me make this movie there, my first movie as a first-time director, on a script that I’d wrote? I was like, “Okay,” but I was terrified, that sweat of like, I have to figure out how to create something around this thing of this girl and whatever. I agreed, and I was in such a panic about it. I met Susan Orlean, who was super cool. We chatted a bit, and she said, “You should really meet the girl.” I flew to Boston, and I met the girl and her mom, who worked in police. They were super nice. We spent a couple hours chatting in this hotel lobby. Then I went to the Red Sox-Yankees game. I’m a huge Yankees fan. The Yankees destroyed the Red Sox. It was super fun. Then I still was totally off the planet with like, “What do I do?” John August: Let me stop you there, because I can anticipate what you were going through, because you have maybe a protagonist. You have a central character, but there’s not an arc there. There’s not a confrontation. There’s not an obstacle in the face of her. There’s no villain. There’s no urgency for why does the story start and end. John Gatins: The other thing that was in this young person’s life was that her parents had gone through a divorce. There was a little bit of that. So I was like, “Maybe it’s a divorce movie. Maybe it’s like whatever.” I just started, as we do as a writer, just making shit up and just trying to figure some things out and adding characters to it and having this girl go through this moment. Then it became about, maybe they’re losing their house, and they have to move, and she’s upset about that, and she doesn’t want to leave. Then I started researching racing pigeons, which I knew nothing about. I was like, “Wow, that’s a really fascinating world.” I was like, “Some of these pigeons are worth a lot of money. Who knew that racing pigeons brought all this money?” Then I think that’s where the thread of the idea of, what if she, in an attempt to save her house, goes and steals some racing pigeon from some famous old racing pigeon guy. It becomes a heist. There’s a little heist in the middle. There’s a boy across the street who was her friend, but now they’re of an age where it’s like that coming-of-age story of, like, are we friends, or is there more? Is there something to it? How is school? Is school hard? How do people treat you? How do you see yourself? I love writing about teenagers, because they’re such curious characters. You kind of love them, but I always say teenagers have been sneaking out of their window since the dawn of time. John August: Romeo and Juliet, yeah. John Gatins: It’s just to make bad decisions. We love them, and we forgive them, but they really can be unpredictable and fun as movie characters. John August: You’re starting to figure out the pieces of this. Are you going back to pitch Steven and Stacy, or are you just writing a script and delivering? John Gatins: Literally, they left me alone, which was the great and awful news at the same time, because it was like, “I need some help.” I was terrified. Honestly, it’s one of those experiences where I wrote the script and I turned it in and I flew to New York. I have family in New York, and we were on a family vacation. We went there. I was just terrified. Clicking send was like, “This is the end. They’re going to look at this and say, ‘What the fuck did you do? What is it?'” Steven Spielberg called me, and he was like, “I love this. I want to make this movie.” I was like, “Okay. Sure. What do you need from me?” kind of thing. It was such a small movie too that I was like, “Why would Steven Spielberg-” John August: Because this was made for Universal? John Gatins: I think, yeah, their output was Universal at that time, I think. But Steven was really enthralled with the movie. It’s funny, because I feel like some of the only other Irish guys in the movie business are the Burns brothers. Brian was a good friend of my brother’s. He called my brother, and he said, “Eddie,” – his brother, Ed Burns – he said, “was with Steven Spielberg this weekend. Steven kept talking about this bird script that your brother wrote,” and blah blah blah. I was like, “Wow, it’s genuine. It’s really on Steven’s mind.” Steven was so supportive of it, because it was just kind of unique. It was just kind of this strange, unique coming-of-age story of this girl and has a heist and a little bit of a love story. She meets this older character guy, and they smash into each other. Y’all have seen the movie. Steven was a really supporter of it. But the business changes all the time. We’re talking about scripts that die. Part of the reason the script dies is because these producers’ deals ended, and the studio owns the movie, so then it moves on, and then someone finds it, or a new executive comes in and says, “Hey, there’s this John August script on the shelf. Let’s take a look at that. Maybe we should breathe some life into this,” get the paddles, as you say. And maybe another writer has an approach. It’s like, “Read it. You read it. See what you think.” It went to Paramount, because they had this split, so it was dead, basically, for Dreamworks. But what was cool about it was that Steven, I think, really lobbied for me to work on Real Steel. Now it’s 2007, and I get brought into the Peter Berg world of, they’re going to make this movie, Real Steel, which is one of the properties they kept. And I went on the whole ride with that movie for two years or whatever. Little Wing was dead and gone. John August: Dead and gone after a draft? Had you gotten a draft set and polished? John Gatins: I probably had done a rewrite based on some notes, because when it went to Paramount, they pulled it out and said, “Hey, we should make this for Nick.” It was Nickelodeon. It was like, “This could fit for them. It could be a small movie,” whatever. I think I did a draft with them. The Nickelodeon movie people there were cool. I think there was a moment of trying to make it whatever, and then it went quiet. Then it was years and years later. I don’t even remember. Donald DeLine called me. He was at Warner Bros. He said, “Susan and these guys came in, and they wanted to do an animated version of this Little Wing story.” He said, “I started looking through the rights and realized you’d written a script, so then I went and got the script. I think the script is great. Let’s make this movie.” I was like, “Okay. I don’t know how to do that.” Paramount Players was in existence then. They took a shot. We talked about it. We met some directors and whatever else. But we’re trying to make the movie for literally $5 million or less. It was like, “I don’t really know how to do… I’m here to help you guys, whatever.” It kind of died again. Then I think the next thing along the line was, I had worked on Power Rangers with Dean Israelite, and I sent it to him. I said, “What do you think of this?” He was like, “I love this. I want to help make this movie.” Brian Robbins, who’d been a collaborator who I’d written movies for way in the past- John August: And was running Paramount. John Gatins: And now had just came in to run Paramount. And he started working with Dean. We said to him, “We want to do this.” He said, “I love this script. If you guys can get Brian Cox to play Jaan Vari,” who was my high school health teacher, by the way, who I worked for over the summer. He was a Vietnam vet. I worked for him as a lifeguard over the summer. I had a long relationship with Jaan, who was a really cool guy. Suddenly, he’s like, “If you guys can get this to happen, we’ll make the movie.” Through a lot of craziness, we got Brian Cox to agree to do the movie, so it made the movie kind of go. John August: This was a few years into Succession? John Gatins: It was right towards the tail end. I think they were working the last season or something. We were like, “Great.” Then they were like, “Can you get Kelly Reilly?” I’m like, “How do I get Kelly?” Yes, I knew her from Flight, loved her. She’s amazing. We actually lived next door to each other in the hotel that we were all staying in when we were making that movie in Georgia. I sent her an email. I was just like, “Hey, do you remember me?” I said, “Would you look at this script and whatever?” I also knew her agent, so I reached out to him as well, and we texted back and forth and whatever. She texted me, like, “I love this script.” I said, “Meet Dean.” Then Dean, the director, and she had a Zoom and whatever, and suddenly she wanted to do the movie. John August: At what point were you actually producing? Functionally, what you’re doing is producing, but at what point were you actually a producer on this? John Gatins: I think what was cool is that my partners in that were Donald, because it had come to him, and he breathed life into it. And then I had been working with Karen Rosenfelt on something else, and I said, “Hey,” I said, “Will you look at this?” She read it. She was like, “I’ll help you.” I said, “Okay.” I pulled Karen in. Then Karen and Donald know each other. Then the three of us were exchanging info to say, “I know so-and-so. I’ll call them,” whatever. It was a little bit like, “I got a washboard. I have a drum set. Let’s make a band.” It’s like, “Here we go.” I knew Dean. We just put this little thing together. Brian kept saying to us, “Okay.” Brian Robbins kept saying, “I trust you guys. Okay.” John August: There was also a unique opportunity at a new channel to put it towards, because you could put it towards Paramount Plus, and so you didn’t have the expectation of like, this is a movie that has to open at a certain amount on a weekend. It doesn’t have to hit this metric or that metric. It can be its own thing. John Gatins: We didn’t know what a streaming movie was. They have all these labels under Paramount. It’s Awesomeness and Nickelodeon, all these different things. I think, what I can tell from the birth of the streaming moment is that they need content. So what is a streaming movie? It’s like, “I don’t know. I guess this is a streaming movie.” So that’s what we did, basically. John August: Looking at the final film, it’s the kind of thing that could’ve been made with outside money and sold at a festival. It’s one of those kind of things that could’ve happened.” John Gatins: I kept saying that to Dean. I was like, “This is a movie from the 1990s.” I was like, “This is a movie that could’ve been a… ” I said exactly that, John. I was like, “This could’ve been one of those movies that people say, ‘I really like that movie. That movie’s got some soul. This is cool.'” I kept saying to Dean, “We don’t really make these movies anymore.” I was like, “This is kind of a rare thing.” Interestingly, Dean really wanted to set it in 2007 with the mortgage crisis about to blow up and everything else. The studio was a little bit like, “We don’t really want to date the movie that way.” We were like, “We don’t want cellphones in the movie. We don’t want all this texting with teenagers and stuff.” We had to find the right middle ground where we make it a little bit just, you don’t really know. We’re not saying it’s this time or that time or whatever. We’re not trying to give timestamps of what moment you’re in. The movie we would’ve liked to set in Boston, because that’s where this young person was from, but it ended up being Portland for budget reasons and lots of things. Portland was a perfect town. John August: It feels right. John Gatins: It’s such an interesting place, Portland, and is a little bit worn out in areas, and it felt right for this kind of story. John August: Cool. In a very broad sense, this fits into, I would say, a sports competition movie, because even though we’re not seeing them racing per se, it’s not about the birds themselves racing, it fits into your general oeuvre of sports competitions. You did Summer Catch, Hardball, Coach Carter, Dreamer, Real Steel. I want to talk a little bit about the broad shapes of sports movies, because in some cases, the sport is the focus, and we’re literally watching, like, “Will they win the game?” And sometimes sports is just the background. Summer Catch, I would say it’s a movie with baseball, but it’s not a movie about baseball. Is that fair? John Gatins: Yeah, that’s fair. That’s fair. John August: In all these kind of movies, we’re really talking about what is the POV? Is the POV of the player? Is it the coach? Is it the parents, like in The Blind Side? You can make a zillion different football movies. It really ultimately comes down to whose POV you’re trying to tell the story from. John Gatins: Look. Sports culture in America is a really specific thing. We use those catchphrases all the time. People in the office are like, “Come on, guys. Bottom of the ninth. We got to hit it out of the park.” It’s part of who we are. Look how many people watch the Super Bowl. This year we had Taylor Swift. It’s crazy. I think that those stories are endlessly fascinating, like all the cool documentary series now about sports guys. And the Jordan documentary, that series that we watched, was incredible, that Mike Tollin made. I think that we’re enthralled by that because it’s dramatic. Are you going to win or lose? It’s personal. Ling is my wife. John knows. I’m saying that, Drew, my wife’s name’s Ling. Ling always says to me she’ll watch sports with me because I do the background commentary. I’m like, “Oh, this guy actually had broken his leg. He’s on the comeback. He’s late 30s. He shouldn’t be this good. This is really amazing that this guy is able to do this thing.” Now she’s really interested. You hear the personal story, and it’s like, “Oh, now I’m in. Now I’m in.” John August: The idea of the sports commentary behind the scenes, you’ll provide context in the room, but often one of the things you’re wrestling with in writing the movie is how much commentary are you providing, and are you actually providing a commentary character to help explain things. I was talking to a friend with his script about esports. I said, “One of the things I really missed in this final competition sequence was the sense of live commentary happening to provide context for what I’m seeing, because that way it’s not beholden on my character’s doing it.” It’s nice to have some authoritative voice explaining what it is we’re actually watching. John Gatins: Look. Remember Rocky, which created everything for sports movies in a way? There’s one crucial scene in Rocky that I try to put in every sports movie I’ve ever done, and I’ve done a few. He says to her, “I can’t win.” The guy is like, “I can’t win. That’s the problem here.” Guess what, guys? He doesn’t win. That’s not what the movie’s about, honestly. It’s that he did it. I think that that’s what we relate to as humans. I’d love to do a lot of things. There’s a lot of things I’m not ever going to do. I’m not going to win at things that I think that I would like to try to do. But I think we get inspired by those things, to say, “Wow, that’s heroic that this person is trying to do this thing.” Guys, the Olympics are coming. We’re all going to get invested in the Olympics, about sports and people in that sport that I know nothing about. There’s some young female athlete that’s going to do some incredible thing that I don’t know anything about right now. But you catch me after the summer, I’m going to tell you everything there is to know about that person, because I’ve watched the journey, and I’ve seen the backstory now. It’s like, “Oh, she lived with her mom,” and this and that. It’s going to be some incredible, inspiring story. We just as humans have that kind of emotional connection to those things, because we put ourselves in those situations, like, “Oh my god, what would I do if I had one run left on the ski hill?” It’s like, “I got to go full out. I have to risk my life to try to win this medal.” John August: We’re putting ourselves in their place. We’re performing this relationship with them. But equally crucial is the relationships happening inside the context of the movie and figuring out what those are early on, which is obviously a problem for Little Wing. It’s figuring what is the relationship here, who you’re going to try to follow. Let’s talk about coach movies, so Hardball versus Coach Carter, figuring out who is the central relationship. Obviously, one part of that’s going to be the coach. But is it with a single player? Is it with multiple players? How do you work that through? John Gatins: It’s tough, because – you know this from writing movies – you write a great scene, and you’re like, “That scene, along with every other scene, is going to fight for its life to get to the screen.” Sometimes you shoot, you write, they shoot, they perform amazing scenes, and they die, because it just doesn’t fit the ultimate quilt that is the movie. When you have a sports movie, you’ve got five guys in the basketball team, but who are the ones who are going to pop? You try to give everybody a moment and everybody a story and a little bit of an arc and something that you’re rooting for for that specific character. You hope that you get it right enough that everybody is able to shine through in the movie and have their movie inside your movie. John August: Exactly. John Gatins: That’s really the idea is like, “Oh, it’s a story about this guy who played short stop.” That’s not really what the movie’s about, but he has a movie in the movie. Yeah, it’s tough. John August: It’s tough, tough. Did you see Nyad? John Gatins: I haven’t seen it yet. John August: Nyad is fantastic. One of the things I really liked about the model of it is, the same filmmakers did a bunch of rock climbing movies, which are a similar dynamic, which is it’s one person against an obstacle. Within that context, you have, will they achieve the thing? Will she swim from Cuba to Florida? Will this guy ascend this impossible mountain face? You still have to find relationships. You still have to find moments of emotional stakes that are not just the will they or won’t they. I thought Nyad did a fantastic job doing that. John Gatins: That’s cool. That’s on my list. I’m going to see that. John August: Again, making a choice of what is the central relationship, which is, of course, in this one, her friendship with Jodie Foster’s character and all the permutations and struggles they’re in. John Gatins: Plus, I love those actors. That’s the thing too is you’re going to see it because of them. John August: Let’s answer some listener questions. Let’s start with David here. Drew: David in London sent in an audio question. We’ll play that now. David: I’m a few weeks away from being on set for my first production as a writer, feature film. And I’ve put in a lot of prep and spade work over the years. I know I’m the right person for this job right here and right now. But what I’m not prepared for is being public facing. You guys both demonstrate an incredible ability to talk about your work, to talk about your relationships in a proper and correct way. You never badmouth anyone, but you also feel very open and authentic as you speak to us. How? When I speak, I’m always telling anecdotes about people I work with and things that have happened. And I bet you guys have got great stories you share privately about Pedro Pascal or Guy Ritchie or whatever. I’m scared that I am going to make a terrible cockup on social media or in person when I’m speaking as a professional. So I guess my question is, how do you guys compartmentalize? John August: Let’s talk about how you talk about the things you worked on, because you just brought up Steven Spielberg. In talking about Spielberg, you said all the positive things. You said how supportive he was and didn’t go into any frustrations there, which is I think part of the advice we have for David. You have to talk openly and honestly, but just talking about the good things. John Gatins: Look, it’s funny, because before you started to roll, we were talking about credit stuff, which I think we’ll talk about later. I don’t know. It’s interesting, because y’all have done this podcast for a long time. I get texts sometimes. People say, “Mazin talked about you on him and John’s podcast today,” or whatever, which I always think is kind of funny. It’s hard, because screenwriters, we work really closely, we work right next to Pedro Pascal. We’re not Pedro Pascal. People want to talk to Pedro Pascal. They don’t really want to talk to the guy who wrote the thing that he’s going to say. But you guys have proven that a little bit wrong, because how many people listen to this podcast? John August: Tens of thousands. John Gatins: That’s a lot of people who are very fascinated by how the soup gets made. I’m going to use sports metaphors again. John August: It’s fine. John Gatins: [Crosstalk 00:31:07]. John August: Stick on theme. John Gatins: Patrick Mahomes wins the Super Bowl. What does he say? He’s like, “The defense was amazing today.” He didn’t say, “I did that 40-yard run that basically won the Super Bowl,” which I watched. I was like, “Dude, you did that.” It’s a thing of, take less credit. People like people who take less credit. Bring people along. There’s a lot of people. Naomi Despres made this movie, Little Wing. I invited her in. I said, “Can you help us? Because I can’t go to Portland and be on the ground every day.” She moved her world around to do it. She has so much hand in making this movie, even creatively. There’s a moment in the movie where she talks about Bikini Kill and Kathleen Hanna. That’s Naomi, who said to me, “There’s a band.” I’d heard of Bikini Kill, but I didn’t really know them. The woman’s story and the song and everything else really fit. I had written Tupac Shakur 15 years ago. This was a really relevant, local to Portland thing. It was genius. That was amazing. She doesn’t have writing credit on the movie. But she’s such an integral part of us making that movie that that’s an incredible thing. Maybe an advice to this guy is to say, listen, remember how you got there. We don’t make this movie by ourselves. You’re God when you’re sitting by your computer by yourself and you’re creating a world. You’re on your own. You are the god and creator of that universe. As soon as I say to you, John, my friend, “Hey, can you read this for me? Can you help me? Do you want to produce this movie?” now I’m sharing godship. By the time you’re sitting on the set, there’s 200 people there doing all kinds of things. Now everybody’s a little bit God in their own piece of universe. Realize that it is a collaborative thing. There is somebody who says, that’s the director, that’s that title, producer, executive producer, script supervisor. Everybody has a role in this thing. Just bear that in mind that we did this. Somebody gave us the opportunity to do this. Without Steven Spielberg, this movie doesn’t exist. That was the inception. Without Susan Orlean, who wrote this thing, that got Steven to do a thing, that got him to make me do this thing. You’re a piece of a really big thing I think is maybe the takeaway. John August: I would also say, David, you’re asking about speaking professionally, and it really is the context that matters. If you’re doing the literal press junket for the movie, you’re going to have a very narrow list of things you’re going to say and talk about. You’re going to talk about what a great experience it was. What John is saying in terms of, be really generous giving credit out there. You can contextualize your part of the process. Always make sure that you speak up for the existence of the writer. That is so important. John Gatins: Of course. John August: But you’re giving full credit. As you get into narrower groups, you can be a little bit more forthright about the pros and the cons and the ups and the downs, and you can avoid shitting on somebody, but also say this was a struggle for these reasons. John Gatins: Yeah, exactly. John August: I will talk about a filmmaker I’ve worked with and say, “Listen, he has this reputation,” and you’d go into it knowing that this is the kinds of things you’re going to be doing or not doing. That’s also fair. When you get into really small conversations, when it’s you and an executive, you can be much more open about, “These are the pros and the cons. This was the real struggle we had.” That bonds you a little bit closer, because you’re telling the truth there. John Gatins: Look, I think I’ve had a unique experience, because as you know, I’m a failed actor who started trying to do that. I became a writer. I’ve produced. I’ve directed. I’ve now done a little bit of all of it. I’m very comfortable on a movie set. I think he’s asking a question about, he’s feeling a little bit like, “I don’t know that this is my world.” You have your place in that world. You’ll see how comfortable you are or aren’t vis a vis that. Those conversations, like you said, he may get specific questions that are like, “Why did you write this movie? What inspired you to do it? Did you write it every day? How many hours a day can you work? Do you outline?” All this stuff that people want to ask, specific questions about being a writer. John August: Totally. John Gatins: You’re going to answer those questions really honestly. They may also put a mic in his face and say, “What was it like meeting Pedro Pascal?” John August: They will ask that, yeah. John Gatins: They’ll ask that, and you’ll be like, “It’s amazing. He’s great. In my mind, I wrote for him. The whole time, I had his voice in my head.” Maybe that’s true; maybe it’s not. Maybe you say, “I wrote it for George Clooney, but Pedro Pascal is better.” I don’t know. It depends on the question and the situation. It can be kind of overwhelming, because I’ve sat on stages with movie stars, and they ask me questions about specific script stuff. You’re always a little bit like, “Is this the forum to have this conversation?” because you realize you have these people here who people really want to hear from. I don’t know. That’s why I appreciate what y’all do. It’s talking to writers about writing. It’s really interesting. John August: Great. Another question. Drew: Leann from Burbank writes, “I’m writing a comedic feature script which has a proper ending, but after cutting to black, then has a couple scenes that play alongside the rolling end credits, like Principal Rooney getting on the school bus during the credits of Ferris Bueller. Have you seen a mid-credit roll sequence dictated in a script before? Any thoughts on best practices?” John August: I absolutely have seen those. I think I might’ve put them in some of my scripts too. You do a cut to black, you do a fade out, and then a page break, and then mid-credits or a mid-credit roll or after credits, it’s an extra scene. John Gatins: I’m trying to think. I’ve been asked to do things where it’s like, “Give us written summations of what happened to people a little bit.” The movie ends, but it’s like, “By the way, in 2010, this happened.” Seeing additional scenes, I don’t know, a lot of times they feel like they’re stuff that was shot in the movie that you kind of want to see, but it didn’t fit into the quilt. It’s like, this is cool stuff that didn’t get in there. That’s a square that didn’t make the quilt, but it’s cool, and I think you guys might ask about, “Whatever happened when he got on that bus? Did he get on the bus?” John August: Remember the script is meant to encapsulate the experience of watching the movie. If part of watching the movie is those mid-credit scenes or after-credit scenes, they should be in the script. John Gatins: Yeah, I guess so. I guess the task a lot of times is you’re trying to jam a bunch of shit inside a 120-page box, so good luck with that. The stuff that spills out the top, either you find a place and jam it in or take something out and jam it in. John August: Would it be fair to mark those as pages 119A and 119B? Sure, maybe. They’re part of the running time, but other stuff’s happening at the same time. You’re not responsible for the credits in your script. I would say if they’re important to your story, then they should be in the script, because your script is the movie. Another question. Drew: Old Bruce writes, “Have I officially become the old guy looking at all these youngsters who seem to struggle with the reality of what work is? Is there a universal and generational confusion that success is not a right but earned? And have people’s threshold of try become much lower than it used to be?” John August: Old Bruce, you’re completely correct on every level. John Gatins: The two Old Johns will collude with you, Old Bruce. John August: These young people today have no idea. Of course, if you were to slide this conversation back 30 years, the equivalent of Bruce would say, “These young people have no sense of what it is to work.” You’ve reached a point where you are generationally appropriately complaining about the generation behind you. John Gatins: Yeah, and I think that’s a rite of passage. John August: I would say that a thing I notice about this younger generation is there can be that hustle and grindy culture. I guess we had some of that when we started in our 20s, but it’s more deliberate. It feels more calculated, more planned. People are willing to put themselves in uncomfortable, long situations to do stuff that I don’t know I necessarily was. But also, there’s the internet. Stuff is also just different. John Gatins: I know. They just need to get off my lawn. Believe me. But it’s different. We’ve been doing it so long. It changes. You become a different writer along the way, because trust me, if we could go back in time, there’s moments that I would pick that would be embarrassing, where I would literally be the guy who’d be like, “I’m going to tell you why water’s wet, guys. I got this. I know all the answers, man. You want to talk about screenwriting? I know everything. I can do anything.” I don’t feel that way anymore. I feel like I’ve earned it. I’ve earned the idea that I don’t know or I’m going to learn more or remain teachable and be like, “Let me see something else. A streaming movie? What television has become?” Television used to be like, we were screenwriters [unintelligible 00:39:30] TV. Now it’s like TV’s the greatest shit there is. John August: One of the things I’m aware of increasingly is that I expect young writers today to actually understand the references that I had when I was in my 20s, but that’s not realistic. It’s not accurate. Why have you not seen Point Break? Of course you should’ve seen Point Break. Or a bunch of stuff where it’s like, of course it’s just my part of film history canon. John Gatins: I know. John August: They cannot have caught up on all of that stuff. John Gatins: I know. John August: That’s a thing I just have to get past and remind myself, of course you’re not going to see that, because that is the equivalent of Casablanca or something to them. It’s very far in the past. John Gatins: I think the other thing too is there’s an immediacy to culture now because of cellphones. When I first started as a screenwriter, I remember faxing pages. John August: Oh yeah, we faxed pages. John Gatins: From Austin, Texas, when I was working on Varsity Blues, faxing pages. Being on location doing Behind Enemy Lines. There was only three hours a day where we could talk to the people at Fox. So we would just hide. We’d just be like, “If they don’t call us in this hour, we’re just going to keep shooting.” John August: Yeah, totally. John Gatins: “We’re going to just do what we’re doing.” But I think everything is so immediate. Good writing is rewriting. You don’t write a script and like, “That’s it. I’m done.” There’s a thousand drafts you’re going to do. I think that’s a little bit baked into that question. You got to realize, I know you think that’s the finish line. It really isn’t. There’s so much work to do beyond that finish line. You have no idea. In this world of boom, boom, the phone, click click click click, it doesn’t work that way. It’s not as immediate as you want it to be, because what we talked about before is movies take forever to get there. Movies don’t get made. They fight. They fight their way to life. Sometimes it takes 17 years. It’s just the truth. John August: Could I challenge you on something you said about Little Wing? You said you clicked send to Steven Spielberg for the script, but you probably didn’t click send. You probably sent an actual script. John Gatins: That’s a really good question. John August: I remember distinctly, and you’ll have this memory too, you’d call the agent or the executive for them to send a messenger. John Gatins: Yeah, to pick it up. John August: You’d still be printing the script. Then you’d catch a typo and like, “Oh, no, I have to reprint that page.” John Gatins: I had this stamp that my wife Ling’s parents had given me. It’s this jade thing that had the characters of my name, John, and then it had J-O-H-N underneath it, and it had a little ink pad. It was in red. I would put a stamp when I was done and I’d printed it. I’d stamp it. It was so silly. But I was superstitious then too. I was like, “That went well the first time, so I got to stamp it every time.” John August: Absolutely. John Gatins: It’s printing the script and doing the stamp and the whole thing. It’s like, “I don’t have my stamp!” It was this whole crazy thing, printing the script and sending it. I think that that was email, but I still was in the world of printing it. I don’t know. John August: The reason why I bring that up is because we talked about faxing pages, and I have this very distinct memory of being bunkered in this really bad hotel room in Kauai and having to fax pages from the front desk to Kathy Kennedy. That was the only way to get pages to her. It was crazy. John Gatins: They were those thin, weird pages that after two days they were dust. You couldn’t even see what was- John August: I had flown with my StyleWriter printer so I could print out my pages and then fax them through to Kathy Kennedy. It’s wild. These younger generations, they have no idea how we suffered to get them to where we are right now, now that it’s- John Gatins: It’s true. John August: … typing away and- John Gatins: Oh my god. John August: … emailing stuff through. Let’s answer one more question. Drew: Under Wraps writes, “Right before the pandemic, I signed an option agreement with a production company. About a week or two after we signed, the strike was officially called. I assumed since we finalized everything before that, that it wouldn’t affect my getting paid. However, the producer let me know that he was instructed to hold all payments until after the strike was over. “Fast-forward to the strike ending, and after not hearing anything from the producer for a few weeks, I shot him a message. I didn’t specifically bring up the money, but just asked about plans now that the strike was over. He informs me that he’s moving forward with production and is optimistic. “Jump to now, months later, we haven’t spoken since. I know these things move slowly, but the difference here was that I was actually supposed to be getting a nice little chunk of cash. I don’t want to sound money-focused, just messaging the producer, ‘Yo, where my money at?’ But I really could use it right now. I don’t have any reps to handle this for me, and I’m at a loss for how to word this kind of message. How do I get what I’m owed without coming off like a money-hungry jerk writer who doesn’t care about the art of film development?” John August: This could be a generational issue. I think I was much more direct about, “Need money. Need check now.” A couple things, Under Wraps. First off, if you sign an option agreement, the strike had nothing to do with that, and so you still needed to get paid. You get paid. They owe you the money. They’re shopping this thing around that they’ve optioned from you, but they haven’t actually really done the option, because they’ve not paid you the money. You need to be much more direct about, like, “You may have forgotten, but you never actually paid me for this thing.” John Gatins: The not having reps thing is tough in that situation, because there’s somebody whose job it is, hopefully, to be the one that says, “We need the money,” because it is show business. So there is a business side to it. And it’s good to have partners, be they lawyers, agents, managers, that can have that conversation on your behalf. John August: Absolutely. We had Aline on the show a couple weeks ago. We talked about being agentic, taking agency in your life. This is a situation where this guy needs to take agency and to say, “Oh, this thing needs to happen. I’m going to make it happen.” Pretend you are your own best friend and you’re going to go in and just do this thing for your friend, which is get your friend paid. John Gatins: I would get the guy on the phone too. Email’s a little bit removed. Just say, “Hey, call me quick.” John August: In that conversation you had about what was happening next, segueing from that into like, “Oh, it’s so great this is happening. Also, you haven’t paid me. You may have forgotten that you haven’t paid me.” You can [unintelligible 00:45:28] they forgot, but they have to pay you. Got to get paid. It is time for our One Cool Things. John Gatins, what is your One Cool Thing? John Gatins: It’s interesting. Ling’s uncle and aunt came to visit recently from Arkansas. They’re retired. They’re the coolest people. They were like, “We just have to tell you,” because they were staying in our guest area, and they said, “You have this kind of finch. You’ve got this kind of woodpecker,” and whatever. I was like, “What?” They were like, “There’s this app called Merlin, which you can download for free, and you can literally record singing birds, and it will tell you what the bird is, and it shows you a picture and this whole thing.” They showed us all of these pictures of these birds. They were excited, because they don’t live in this part of the world. They were like, “Check it out. You’ve got this short, blah blah blah woodpecker thing.” I was like, “Oh my god.” Pearl used to be so annoyed by this woodpecker outside her window. She’s like, “There’s this bird.” It’s this really beautiful looking bird. I just thought that was the coolest thing. I was like, “Oh my god.” Who knew there’s an app that can identify birds? John August: That’s awesome. Just this morning, there was a bird who I remember hearing from before. It was a morning bird that can be really annoying. But we sleep with the white noise machine turned so high that I don’t hear it anymore. Sometimes in the bathroom early in the night I hear it. John Gatins: Just download Merlin, and you can maybe understand where that bird’s coming from a little bit. John August: Absolutely. 100 percent. John Gatins: That bird’s trying to tell you something, John. John August: Absolutely. John Gatins: It’s like, “Listen.” John August: It’s like when you have noisy neighbors, and you’re like, “I hate them,” and then you meet them, it’s like, “Oh, it’s actually not so bad.” John Gatins: That bird might have notes on your scripts that you need. John August: It might have notes. John Gatins: You don’t know. John August: My One Cool Thing is sort of a strange one. We were having a conversation a week or two ago about spinoffs and what is the longest show that’s been on the air if you include the spinoffs from the original show. John Gatins: Whoa. John August: That led me down a rabbit hole towards The Facts of Life. I loved the show The Facts of Life, which for people who are not familiar with it, it is about this girls’ school. You follow these four or five girls who get in trouble and they live in their own little part of the girls’ school with Mrs. Garrett, who’s the cook, and they often work for Mrs. Garrett. It was a shrunk down version of a bigger school. It was a strange situation where the first situation is actually very different than later seasons. Anyway, they kept trying to spin shows off of The Facts of Life, which I think is great. They would do backdoor pilots. A backdoor pilot is one of the normal 22 episodes of a season, they would introduce new characters and set them up and see whether they would work right, and then the hope would be to spin them off of the original show into a new thing. The Facts of Life was a spin-off of Diff’rent Strokes, and so this is trying to spin off other things. Here are some of the backdoor pilots attempted to come out of The Facts of Life: Brian and Sylvia, a Season Two episode in which Tootie and Natalie go to Buffalo, New York to visit Tootie’s Aunt Sylvia, who has recently married a white man. It’s about Brian and Sylvia, these other people. The situation, you’re bringing your protagonist to a new place and trying to spin off these characters. The Academy was a Season Three episode set at Stone Academy, the all-boys military school that was located near the existing school, so basically a boys version of Facts of Life. Jo’s Cousin, another Season Three episode. Jo visits her family in the Bronx, including her cousin Terry, a 14-year-old girl going through adolescence in a family full of men, so just a completely different family show. The Big Fight was a Season Four episode set at Stone Academy, that boys’ military school, so it was another attempt to get that going there. One called Graduation. They’re trying to spin off a show about Blair and Jo and their life in college. There was a Big Apple Blues, a Season Nine episode in which Natalie spends the night with a group of eccentric young people living in a SoHo loft, so trying to create that show. John Gatins: Oh my god. John August: Then The Beginning of the End/The Beginning of the Beginning, which is the two-part series finale, which they were trying to set up these two characters taking over Mrs. Garrett’s role at the school. It’s remarkable over the course of all these years, they just kept trying to spin other things out of it. It’s not a thing we get these days. John Gatins: Wasn’t Clooney a recurring character? John August: That feels right, yes. John Gatins: As you were going through, I’m like, weren’t any of them trying to launch Clooney as a guy who was featured in one of those? John August: You feel like he should. That was pre-ER. I was saying we don’t have spinoffs. I guess we do have spinoffs, because we have all those Yellowstone spinoffs. Drew: There’s also Blackish. It has Brownish and all those. John August: Blackish, yeah. John Gatins: The Walking Dead has- John August: You’re absolutely right. John Gatins: … 15 million. Whatever. I got into watching The Walking Dead when I was on location in Georgia, and it used to freak me out, because it’s shot there. John August: It’s Georgia. John Gatins: I’m like, “That looks like the woods where the walkers are.” Now I just watched the first episode of Those That Lived or I don’t know what. When I was looking for it, 10 other spinoffs, the Daryl Dixon show and then this one and that one. I’m like, “Holy cow.” Fear the Walking Dead. The Walking Dead will never- John August: They will never stop. John Gatins: The zombies, they will never stop. The zombies will never go away. John August: You’re completely right. I guess I’ve been thinking of a very specific, very deliberate, like, “Okay, we’re going to introduce new characters and try to spin them off in a new thing.” But franchisization of shows is really clear now. It’s not just the Cheers to Frasier to Frasier. There’s other ways to do it now. Sell a universe. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Alee Karim. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to [email protected]. That’s also the place where you can send your questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, 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. I’m wearing both a T-shirt and a hoodie right at the moment. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on John Gatins’s mastery of credits and partnership, I guess. John Gatins, congratulations on your movie, and thank you for coming on Scriptnotes. John Gatins: Of course. Thank you guys for having me. I appreciate it. [Bonus Segment] John August: John Gatins, as long as I’ve known you, you’ve been a solo writer. You’re a person who comes in and brings your own pen. You do your work. Then you take off. But recently started working with Andrea Berloff, another friend of the show, and you guys have been writing as partners. Talk to us about that transition. How’d it all come about? John Gatins: It was interesting, because Andrea and I knew of each other, and then we really met in the strike of 2008. John August: We should say that you were a strike captain in 2008 and were always out there with your black parka, a big cheerleader. John Gatins: It’s funny too, because I don’t know that I was ever officially penciled as such, but I think I emailed people and said, “I’m going to be at Universal,” and then friends of mine just started showing up. Then you were there. There was a lot of people that we knew there. I had the acapella group from UCLA come. We had fun. Whatever. Strikes are not fun. That’s not the idea. But Andrea showed up there. She was like, “Hey.” She always tells the story, she’s like, “You’re the first person besides my husband to know that I was pregnant.” I was like, “Oh, okay,” because she was like, “Look, I’m going to be a little intermittent.” I was like, “Andrea, I’m not in charge.” I was like, “You do whatever. Trust me.” We were like the MASH unit of Strikeville. We became friendly there. Then I can’t even remember the year it was. It was 2014. I don’t know. I’m making it up. But we both got invited to be in a room, quote unquote, for Activision Blizzard. Stacey Sher invited us to be writers in this room, because they were trying to figure out Call of Duty movies. John August: Why has there not been a Call of Duty movie? John Gatins: Why has there not been? John August: Yeah. John Gatins: I’ll give my own opinion. John August: Please. John Gatins: Again, it’s going to be very uneducated. But it was an incredible room. We heard so many military experts who came in. It was incredible. Guys who had really done… Will Staples was really integral in facilitating the intros to these people in the military world and politicians. It was incredible. I learned so much, because I really don’t know that much about the military. I think at the end of the day, you realize when they release a Call of Duty, it makes hundreds of millions of dollars in a weekend. To try to say that you would make a movie that would help that event, it would really have to be a movie that would be on a level that I think ultimately they never saw anything that led them to believe that this is going to in fact help their brand in a way. That’s just, again, my take, because it was really a big aspirational attempt to try to launch three different series of movies, because there was Call of Duty, there was Modern Warfare, there was Black Ops. There was a bunch of different segments in the game world from that umbrella, and they tried to attack all fronts at the same time with lots of really smart people in a room. And there was lots of good ideas, but it just never full came together, I think. John August: My hunch is they should’ve found the best military spec they could’ve found and called it Call of Duty. John Gatins: That’s a really smart thing. Who knows? They may actually ultimately do that. But in that room, Andrea and I, we partnered up as producers, because they took six writers and made three teams of two to be producers that were assigned a screenwriter. Then we helped that person form an idea based on the franchise we were working on kind of thing. Andrea and I were together every day for a month. Somewhere in the middle of it, we said, “We should write a movie together,” which as you said, I’ve never done that before. Neither had she, by the way. She has a great, thriving career all on her own. It was this weird thing of like, “Maybe.” We talked to our agents about it a little bit and whatever and said, “We’ll just try.” We didn’t think it was going to be like, “We’re going to do this forever.” It was this odd thing of like, “Oh my god, I’m actually going to write with another writer.” We called Phil and Matt actually and said to them, “Hey, guys, how do you do it?” They gave us their thing of cards on a board of this scene, this scene, this scene, and then saying, “I want to write that one. Why don’t you do that? No, I want to do this one.” You divvy up the work and you do it and then you share and you back and forth and whatever. We figured it out. It was interesting, because we’re at a point now where we don’t… I don’t think, anyway. She can speak for herself if you ask her. We joke all the time. It’s like, “You wrote that.” She’s like, “No, you wrote that.” I’m like, “Oh, I did?” It’s like, “No.” It’s a little bit seamless at this point, which I think is a good place to be. It’s great to have a lab partner. It’s such a solemn, weird thing that we do. Humans are social creatures. I don’t know. It’s been good. It’s actually been really fun. John August: You’re the only writer I can think of who, at this stage in their career, partnered up, because it’s just much more generally people are splitting apart at this age. You guys, you’re holding each other accountable, but also you’re showing up to work in a way that is important. John Gatins: We take meetings. We work for Netflix now, and have for over a year, in an exclusive kind of deal with them, which has been really fun and great. It’s just really nice. I think we were both at the perfect time in our lives that it was like, “This would be a cool thing to try to do together.” It’s been really awesome, honestly. John August: The other thing I would love to talk to you about on mic a little bit is, of all the writers I’ve met over my career, you are the most savvy when it comes to, “Okay, six of us worked on a movie, and it’s now time to figure out credits.” It will go to arbitration or we can decide amongst ourselves and all agree on what the credits should be. You are very good at starting those conversations and figuring out ways to get everyone to agree on credits. Can you talk me through how that started and what your approach is for it? John Gatins: To be honest, I don’t remember exactly how it started, but I’ve come to the place where a lot of times when I think back on the… There was a very long run in my career where I was a guy who would come in towards the end, and I’d do production rewrite work. I’ve also been fortunate that I am comfortable on a set, and directors I’ve been paired with, I’ve gotten along well with, who were like, “Hey, come help me.” I worked with a couple of first-time directors or younger directors, and it was great. It was like the Bull Durham relationship of like, I’m the old guy, and here’s a young person trying to do something. The studio liked me and felt like I could help. So I’d be on set and that kind of thing. When it would come down to the credit thing, at some point maybe I knew one of the other writers initially and just reached out and said, “What are you thinking? They’re going to make a recommendation, and then we’re all going to go to our corners and try to write a manifesto that says, ‘This is what I think I deserve.’ Maybe we can have a conversation.” I got to know the Guild people enough, having been through enough arbitrations and been an arbiter, that I would have a conversation with them. I would immediately come out and say, “Hey, can I have so-and-so’s number, or can you tell them here’s my number? If they want to chat with me, great, call me. If they don’t, that’s okay too.” I would always start the conversation the same way and say, “Hey, listen. You worked on this, and I worked on this. If you’re open to a conversation, we can have it. I fully understand that there’s a really good chance this is going to arbitration, which is okay. We’ve all been through it. But because we’re in the soup together, is there anything you want to share?” or, “I feel this,” or, “I feel that,” or, “Maybe there’s a way that we can work it out.” The Guild, I think that they would appreciate that, because it’s pitting writers against writers, which is never great, because as we said, it’s about resume, and there’s money and residuals, bonus residual. There’s all kinds of things about ownership of things and movie posters that don’t have your name on it that you feel like, “I deserve to have my name on it.” It’s very difficult. Of course, the credits thing came up with additional writers at the end of the thing. It’s such a ballyhoo kind of thing that it’s difficult. It’s never perfect. It’s the best system we have. I know Craig’s worked hard on the manual, to try to say, listen, let’s revisit some of these things about what are the percentages and how do we mete this all out to make it make sense? Look. My experiences vary. I’ve met some really cool writers that way. There’s been some things that have really gotten sorted, and it felt really fair and cool, and everyone walked away being like, “Hey, I appreciate you did that. This is cool,” and that kind of thing. Other times, it’s been not as good. It’s been like, “Look, we’ll just go to arbitration and see how it works out.” John August: I’ve had both situations. I think, inspired by your example, I’ve reached out to writers on projects to see whether there’s a useful way for us to think about what the credits should be. Also, if I’ve come onto a project, I try to reach out to the original writer or writers to see where the bodies are buried. That almost starts the relationship a little bit earlier before it becomes figuring out the credits. Important to remember is that these writers can figure it out amongst themselves unless one of them is a production executive. John Gatins: Yeah, that’s a little different. John August: If someone’s a director or a producer. John Gatins: That’s different. John August: Increasingly, if a director is going for credit, that’s off the table, because- John Gatins: It’s an automatic arbitration. John August: Automatic arbitration. And same if someone’s a producer. It makes sense why, because that person would have undue power and control over the situation and might have their fingers on the scale. Now, one of the things I’ve heard you talk about is that there is the credit you see on screen and the list of credits, but behind the scenes there’s also math about what percentages go to which writers. Those things don’t have to line up precisely. Is that accurate? John Gatins: I think so. It’s such a difficult thing. John August: Here’s what I’m getting to. You will actually have the conversation about, “Let’s talk about money,” because one of the reasons why you want to talk about money is that different writers would have different box office bonuses based on what credit they get. John Gatins: That’s a conversation that people have. That can get into lawyer land, where you say, “Listen. I appreciate what they’ve done. I was in a different situation. I was on a weekly. I don’t have a bonus on this movie. But I’m probably going to get credit. You may have been diminished enough that you’re not going to get credit.” That person says, “Then let me inspire you to invite me in, because I think I deserve credit on the movie.” At times, there’s a financial deal to be made as well. Different things mean different things to different people. If you asked me this question 15 years ago, I might’ve given you a different answer, because having my names on movies was going to change the trajectory of my career or my opportunities. I’m old now. I wish that maybe there was executives out there who haven’t met me or don’t have a preformed opinion of what I do or how I can do or what I’m right for or where I fit on any kind of list on any given day. But I think that there is a little bit of, I don’t know, I am who I am. I’m going to try to do what I do. It’s a fairly difficult thing to apply math to a creative event. John August: 100 percent. John Gatins: That’s I think what you’re asking is to say, “Okay. Look at the script and tell me who did 33 percent of these four or five elements.” John August: We’ve both been arbiters. It’s really tough. John Gatins: It’s a really tough thing. John August: Luckily, there’s the 33 percent math, but it’s really basically, did this person do so much work that they’ve crossed a threshold into getting this. It only gets down to 33 percents of stuff when there’s just too many names and too many people could be jockeying for that thing. John Gatins: It’s hard. Derek Haas has been an arbiter, and he says his approach is he reads the shooting script and then he reads backwards. You try to figure, how do we get to this thing? John August: [Crosstalk 01:03:17]. John Gatins: I was like, that’s a really smart way to say, because you may have written an amazing script, but it was set in 1914. The movie’s actually set in the 1980s now. You go, “What does that 1914 script have to do with the movie that actually got shot?” John August: You may find that there’s a lot, but it may be- John Gatins: It’s like, look, that 1914 script may be the reason the movie got made, but it doesn’t factor into the document that was actually filmed. John August: That’s the crucial thing to remember about the credits process. It’s not about the process of making the movie. It’s literally about the final document. That’s why it can be so crucial, what is the final document? Does the final document actually reflect the movie? We’ve gotten into this before too, where this is the, quote unquote, final shooting script, but that’s not the movie that’s on the screen at all, so you have to go through that stuff too. It’s a challenging situation. John Gatins: It’s a really challenging situation. John August: I do feel like one of the changes from when we first started the business is if I worked really hard on a movie and didn’t get one of those top credits, I just disappeared, and it was like a year of my life just vanished. Additional literary material at least acknowledges, oh, that person, you existed. It’s a change for writers who otherwise might be completely forgotten. It’s proof that you did some work. There’s pros and cons to it. John Gatins: It’s a tough one. It’s difficult. I’m not sure about the additional writing credit thing. I think I’ve probably been in that situation a little bit, because maybe I’ve done work on things where that was an opportunity. John August: I can think of one movie you worked your ass off on, and I was so surprised that your name is not on that movie. You know what I’m talking about. John Gatins: That’s where I learned a lot of lessons, because the statement that I wrote on my behalf was a ridiculous, embarrassing, emotional love letter to a college girlfriend, basically. It was like, “I gave my T-shirt on the day that Van Der Beek wore, and he wore it. I was there.” I’m like, no, you write a comparative literature paper that’s like, “Hey, I did these things,” and whatever. That one didn’t go my way for a lot of reasons. I didn’t help my cause on that one. John August: I’m thinking of a different movie. That’s how many movies there are. John Gatins: Oh my god. John August: I’m thinking of a much more recent movie, a sci-fi movie that you- John Gatins: Look. That was a situation that was really difficult, because I got to know the other writers and had a conversation, because that was one that was very confusing. It was a little bit like, how did we actually get here? Look. We tried. That was one where it was a failure, and it was a little bit like, huh. It was heartbreaking. But it was what it was. John August: You got paid the money during production. John Gatins: I did, I did. I did have a sizable win on the other side that I was feeling like was going to come through and did not. That was not a great moment. It’s a little bit of the peril of doing what I do, which has been a guy who, “Look, I was the fourth writer,” or something. That’s not a very advantageous position to be in. You just said to me, knowing nothing, “John, come on. You’re this guy who came in.” I’m like, “Yeah, but I went through all this.” It’s like calling other writers and saying, “Dude, I know you wrote a great script, but guess what? I’m the one who had to listen to all the nuts-ness of all the craziness and deal with blah blah blah.” John August: Yeah, you had to shoulder and bear so much. You had to body a lot of the problems. John Gatins: It was what it was. Time helps. You get some distance from it and everything. I thought you were talking about Varsity Blues. My thing is, I owe everything to Varsity Blues. That movie did everything for me. My name appears nowhere in that universe, but they paid my bonus anyway. They felt that. How about that? John August: Nice. John Gatins: That executive, Don Granger, was like… My agent called and said, “There’s something here for him.” He goes, “I don’t know anything about that.” It was one of those great movie moment inside the movie business. John August: Love it. John Gatins: It was a really gracious thing that they did. It was very nice. It led to me doing Hardball for them and doing so much work at that studio. I can’t fault that movie. I didn’t help myself in the process. I really didn’t know. That’s the thing I think that upset me most as a really young writer in that moment, the first movie, was that there was nobody in the Writers Guild… I didn’t know a lot of screenwriters. If I’d met somebody who’d said to me, “Hey, listen, man. Why don’t you let me look at that statement?” That’s the point, John. If I’d been an arbiter and I’d gotten that statement… You’ve read plenty of arbiter statements where you want to say, “Don’t ever write a statement like that. This is no help. Trust me. I know you think you’re going to appeal to some emotional whatever. No, no. That’s not an emotional document. This is a document that compares the work you did, compares to the shooting script and to the other documents. That’s what it is.” I shot myself in the foot in that situation. Like I said, that experience and that movie and the success of that movie, I owe so much to. John August: I owe a lot of my success to movies that my names are not on. That’s the reality of this career. John Gatins, so great to talk with you. John Gatins: Great to talk to you, man. Thank you. I really appreciate you guys let me coming on. Links: Little Wing – On Paramount+ March 13th John Gatins on Wikipedia and IMDb Little Wing by Susan Orlean for the New Yorker LUCIRA by Pfizer COVID-19 & Flu Home Test Merlin Bird ID The Facts of Life – Attempted Spin-offs Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt! Check out the Inneresting Newsletter Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription! Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter John on Mastodon Outro by Alee Karim (send us yours!) Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Email us at [email protected] You can download the episode here.The post Scriptnotes, Episode 633: Reviving a Dormant Project, Transcript first appeared on John August.

The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 624 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig and I were both traveling through the holidays, so we asked producer Drew Marquardt to dig through the archives and compile a character compendium. So Drew, what have you got for us? Drew Marquardt: We’ve got three character-related segments that all kind of do with getting into a character’s head space and bring the audience along with them, and really focusing on scene work. John: That’s great. This is probably top of mind for you, because I know you were just working on this characters chapter or chapters for the book. Drew: Yeah, exactly. These are ones that just sort of popped out to me. We talk a lot about character on the level of the entire movie or the entire show, but it was really fun to dig into the specifics in the scene. John: That sounds great. What’s the first segment we’ll hear? Drew: First is a segment on point of view, from Episode 358. That’s, again, point of view for the whole story and also for the scenes and how to play with point of view and use it to your advantage. John: That’s always a good lesson. What’s after that? Drew: Next is the character’s inner emotional states from Episode 472. That’s finding the emotional truths in a scene and thinking about using verbs versus adjectives in terms of what a character’s doing. John: That’s great. Drew: The way watching someone cry doesn’t make you cry necessarily, but watching someone try not to cry and try and do something else can bring out a lot of emotion. John: That sounds good. I remember that discussion of verbs versus adjectives is so useful in talking with actors, but it’s a good way to think about the characters on the page as well. Drew: It’s a very actorly segment, but it all has to do with writing. John: That sounds great. I see the third segment here is all the way back to Episode 151, so quite far into the vaults. Drew: It’s one we don’t do a lot, because Craig’s audio in it is a little bit wonky, if I’m honest. But it sounds like he’s on the phone. It comes through really well, and everything he’s saying is gold, so I had to include him. John: That’s great. It’s on secrets and lies, so why it’s important for your characters to be liars. Your point on audio is well taken. We’ve always prided ourselves on audio on this podcast, but I feel like over the last two or three years, people’s expectations of audio on podcasts has dropped in a weird way. Drew: Interesting. Have you heard it in other places? John: I have. Things that used to be good double-ender conversations where they would send an audio engineer to have a microphone there at the place, now they’re just doing it on Zoom. Even on The Daily, I hear some audio there that I can’t believe they’re getting away with. So I won’t feel so bad about Craig’s audio on this one. Drew: Yeah, exactly. John: Our character theme continues with our bonus segment for premium members. Is that right? Drew: Yeah, we’ll do a segment on single-use characters from Episode 467, including the greatest single-use character of all time, which is, of course, Edie McClurg in Planes, Trains and Automobiles. John: Fantastic. Let’s get into it. I will be back here at the end for the credits. Everyone else, enjoy. [Episode 358 Clip] John: Let’s jump ahead. Let’s go to our big topic of point of view. So this is a craft topic that I said we would talk about in some future episode. This is the episode we’re going to talk about it. So point of view I’m going to define as which characters in a story, movie story, a book, have the ability to drive scenes. Basically, that they can be in a scene by themselves and you will follow them. They can be a scene with strangers and you’ll still follow them. And in some stories it has a single POV, so only the hero can drive a scene. Harry Potter is a classic example of, both in the books and in the movies, essentially, every scene has Harry Potter in the scene. And so you don’t get any information that Harry Potter doesn’t know. Other stories, you could follow anybody in them. So classically, an Altman film. Anybody who wanders through the frame, the camera could follow them and they could be in their own story. Most films are going to have a mix of point of view. You’re going to have obviously scenes driven by your hero, but perhaps you’re able to cut off to the villain and see the villain do stuff and see scenes that are just driven by the villain, or a supporting character, a love interest. So there are different choices. But the choices we make have to be deliberate. And they really help tell the audience how to watch your movie. Craig Mazin: Yeah. I always think about point of view as an answer to a question. With whom am I supposed to identify with in this scene? And by identify with, I don’t necessarily mean I want to be like them, or they are like me, but rather I’m with them. Even if it’s a villain, sometimes I’m with the villain because the villain is considering the glorious possibility of so on and so forth, and I am with them and their ambition or their desire. The big thing that I think a lot of early writers and, frankly, a lot of not early writers, a lot of practiced writers, make the mistake of doing is not choosing a point of view in their scene. To me, there is no possible way to create a successful scene if you do not know whose point of view you’re asking the audience to follow. We are, I think, only capable of having one point of view in a scene. One. That means everything that transpires ultimately is about one person’s eyeballs, essentially. It doesn’t mean that we can’t have other people feeling things and wanting things and doing things, but it’s from one person’s perspective. John: Yeah. So I think you make a distinction here which I think was important to call out is that we can talk about point of view for an entire work, so the course of an entire movie, the course of an entire book, so this book has a certain character’s point of view. It’s told from a certain character’s point of view. But every scene is like a little movie, and every scene is going to have a point of view as well. And so you may have scenes in which two different characters, we’ve followed them separately, and we’ve seen them have separate scenes, they can do stuff, but once we’re in a scene with them together, you’re going to have to tell us which character’s point of view this scene is from. And sometimes you see writers not making that choice, or the writer may have made that choice, but as it was directed, as it was staged in front of you, it wasn’t actually done from that character’s point of view. And that is a real challenge. And so that’s a thing, even at this last Sundance Labs I saw. I’ll describe this project in broad terms, because it’s not a movie that’s out there for people to see yet. It was a story that follows two young boys who have an encounter when they’re kids. Then it jumps forward 30 years. You see these two people as adults. We follow one’s person story. And then we cut to the other person’s story. And we know, because we’ve seen movies before, that eventually they’re going to meet. And in fact, they do meet. But the question is, when they meet, who is driving that scene. And interestingly, as the story was structured, as I was reading it, it had gone back to the first character before the two characters met. And so I was saying that I think it’s from this character’s point of view, because he controlled the last scene. The last person we saw driving a scene is the person we’re going to assume is driving the next scene. And so we talked about like, well, if we took out that scene it would shift, and we would still be in the point of view of the second character. And that’s a crucial distinction. We know they’re going to meet, but literally, who are we going to meet first? Who is driving the scene? Craig: Yep. Absolutely. And it is an important distinction to understand that there is the macro and the micro. And honestly, I find point of view to be the most useful thing to discuss when you are in the micro. Generally speaking the large questions are answered. Who is the star of the movie? Who is the protagonist? Who is the hero? And so on and so forth. But then you have these little moments inside of movies where you have a real choice to make. Harry Potter is certainly, you’re right, it’s from the perspective and the point of view of Harry Potter. But then here and there you have these moments, things like a scene where Ron Weasley is watching Harry and Hermione together, and he gets jealous. That’s from Ron’s point of view. A lot of times, the audience will make certain assumptions based on the way the scene unfolds. And one of the simplest assumptions they make is “The first character I see is going to be the person through whose point of view I will be experiencing this scene.” John: Absolutely. So in the case of Harry Potter, in most scenes we’re going to probably see Harry first and then we’re going to see the supporting characters. Granted, over the course of eight movies we’re going to be used to sort of seeing a different one of those characters first. But you’re not going to have any scenes that are just one character or the other character. There may be shots or little action sequences where we’re only following one, but in terms of bigger sequences, Harry is going to be around for all of those things. If you are figuring out how to tell one story point from the book, you have to figure a way to visualize this information and keep Harry still centerpiece to all this stuff. There’s a great example in Goblet of Fire where quite late in the story, Harry is captured by Voldemort. And there’s sort of an information dump that Voldemort needs to do. Craig: Right. John: That’s an information dump that Voldemort doesn’t necessarily need to do for Harry Potter, but it’s very important for us as the audience to understand. And it’s important that Harry be part of that information dump, because he is our way into this world. Craig: Correct. And in the writing of that section in the book, and then by extension, in the writing of the screenplay and the film that we saw, there is not just a metaphoric point of view but an actual point of view. An actual perspective. And this is a very useful thing to think about as well. When you’re writing these scenes, if you decide that this… I always start by like, “Okay, emotionally, whose point of view should we be honoring here?” And then once I have that understanding, then I start thinking about physical points of view, not just through eyesight but also through sound. So, for instance, a slight variation on the first character you see. You may see a character first, and then we pull back to reveal that someone is watching them. Clearly, there the point of view is with the watcher. You may be on a person’s face, and you hear sounds, and you know that they’re listening. But the actual physical point of view, point of sound is really important in scenes. It’s important because ultimately that is a huge part of how the director directs. There’s no other way to make those scenes work unless you understand point of view, because a lot of directing, just at least from the physical position, is angles. The question is what are the angles? Where are we looking? Where does the camera go? Who is it looking at? And why? John: Last week we talked about the scene from Aliens. And if people watched the scene, you’ll see that even though Burke is doing most of the talking, the scene is very clearly from Ripley’s point of view. She is the one watching and trying to process what he’s saying. And the camera work shows that. It’s really favoring her, and it’s favoring her reactions to his lines rather than him talking. So it’s still her scene even though he’s the one providing the information and bringing what is new to the scene. Craig: Yeah. And you can play games with point of view. You can make it seem like the point of view is one person’s and then it’s another. The great example of that is in the brilliant third act switcheroo in Silence of the Lambs where you think Starling’s point of view is one thing and it turns out it’s another and vice versa. There are scenes where two people have a long discussion, and you’re not quite sure whose point of view it is. And then they get up and they leave and then we reveal that a person has been listening, and they weren’t even in the scene, but it was their point of view retrospectively. Also, point of view gives you an opportunity as a writer to shake things up. If you have a scene that maybe feels a little perfunctory or a little cliché, but it fits nicely into your story and solves a lot of problems, then maybe the answer for spice is point of view. How can you change that point of view? How can you make the point of view of that scene somebody that you wouldn’t expect? Suddenly, the scene becomes so much more interesting and fresh. Here’s a cliché scene. An 11-year-old kid is called in on the carpet by the principal. So it’s the principal yelling at the kid scene. Maybe it’s from the point of view of the principal’s secretary or assistant. Maybe it’s from the point of view of another kid who is waiting to go in next to be yelled at. You find fun, interesting ways to make these things happen. Also, maybe the answer to that scene is, 9 times out of 10, it’s from the point of view of the kid, because the kid is getting yelled at, and we identify with the kid. What if it’s from the point of view of the principal? What if we’re identifying with the principal as they struggle to try and make this work, and then the kid leaves and we stay with the principal after? And that’s what point of view and those decisions get you. It makes you think about what the beginning and the end of the scene will be and who your eyes should be on and who their eyes should be on. It’s an indispensable way of approaching scene work. And I think we honestly just saved a lot of people a lot of money for film school stuff. John: So let’s talk about the specific example you gave for a kid in the principal’s office and what if it’s the secretary’s point of view or the principal’s point of view. Those are all really great, fascinating choices. And if it was the first scene of your story, it would be really interesting and unexpected, because we expect it from the kid’s point of view, and it’s actually from the principal’s point of view or the secretary’s. But if it was the kid’s story, if it was about the 12-year-old boy, we sort of couldn’t stay with the principal’s point of view unless that principal is going to ultimately have storytelling power later in our movie. Craig: Right. John: So the moment you decide to stick around with a character who is not established to be a major character, who is not established to have a storytelling power, you’re suddenly elevating that person. You’re saying like, oh, this is a person that we now have an expectation that we’ll be able to come back to and see independent individual scenes. There’s maybe like 5 or 10 seconds where you can hold on a character after the main character has left before that character goes like, “Okay, there’s something bigger there.” There’s some expectation you’re setting. Just yesterday I saw Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. This is not a movie review. The movie is nuts in a way that I had not anticipated. I really enjoyed it. Partly because it does really odd things. And one of the odd things it does is, there’s a young girl character who is not really established. You don’t see her. But suddenly, like 20 minutes into the movie, we’re cutting to her and her POV and she’s driving scenes by herself. And it sort of threw me at first. It was like, what is this movie? And then I remembered that the Jurassic Park movies always sort of cut to minor characters. They were always elevating these minor people who could suddenly do things by themselves. And this movie takes that and runs with it very fully. But it becomes interesting later on in the story where she and other characters meet and it does get a little bit murky for me, who was in control of the story at that point, because it wasn’t clear whose POV we really were in in some of those scenes. Craig: It’s a great point you’re making that point of view, more than line count or screen time, determines the importance and the salience of any particular role in a story. The more point of view you afford a character, the more important they are, the more elevated they are in the tale. And you’re right. You can actually have quite a few people doing this. But when they all get together, then you do have a problem, because, again – I’ll just say it’s my rule – we as human beings really can only have one point of view at one time. And maybe it’s just the narrative is reflecting the biological. We have one field of vision. We have one field of sound. We can’t see two things at once, and we can’t hear two things at once. We hear a combination of things, or we see a combination of things, but that’s it. And it’s just our one view. So in those conglomeration scenes it’s really important that the screenwriter make sure to figure out who is the point of view person here, because I need to make it really clear in that moment, or else the scene will feel very trifurcated, quadfurcated, and so on and so forth. Sometimes the best thing to do with those characters that you’ve given point of view to is, before you get to that conglomeration scene, kill them. Wayne Knight in the first Jurassic Park has wonderful point of view scenes, and then he dies, because who needs him later? John: This again I don’t think is a spoiler, that Henry Woo, the character played by B.D. Wong in the Jurassic Park movies, shows up in this movie again. And it was strange to me that he didn’t seem to have POV. For a character who has been established through the whole franchise, he’s not allowed to drive any scenes by himself. And it felt like he had sort of earned that. But also, if you look at the course of the actual movie that we’re watching, he shows up kind of late. And so it might have felt strange to give him that power so late in the movie, to elevate him to a place so late in the movie. When you do shift POVs and we do unexpected things with POVs, you do get a real jolt of energy. So I think back to Gone Girl. So Gone Girl as a book, which I loved as a book and was dying to write the adaptation of that, is told as alternating chapters between the husband and the wife. And for reasons I don’t want to spoil in the story, that structure would not continue necessarily, but then when it does continue in ways you couldn’t imagine being possible in the movie, it’s so thrilling that we’ve changed POV midway through the movie. Our fundamental rules of how we watch the movie change halfway through. It was a great adaptation of a really great story that was told from a specific point of view and had to change its point of view in order to work as a movie. Craig: Yeah. It is thrilling. It’s exciting. It’s jarring. And when it’s done well, it is as exhilarating as any car chase, because you are creating a kind of emotional free-fall in people. And one of the thrills we get, I think, from going to movies and watching television shows is the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s point of view, somebody else that’s wildly different from us. Frankly, that’s what we do as writers all day long, right? But when we receive it passively, it can be, because it’s surprising, it’s awesome. And it can really wobble the ground beneath you for a bit in a fun way, as long as it is done expertly and you feel like you’re caught. When it’s not, then it just feels clunky or confusing, or you start to say to yourself, “I don’t really know what I’m supposed to feel here or why.” These are the things that we want to try and avoid when we’re shifting points of view radically. It also occurs to me that sometimes when we talk about stock characters or when we see a movie and we complain about a character that feels cliché, that they aren’t really getting a proper point of view. Rather, they are only existing in someone else’s point of view, and therefore they exist to serve a function. Okay, so you’re going to be the judge in the trial. Well, you’re never going to get a point of view. You’re just there to go, “Overruled,” so that the prosecutor whose point of view we’re living in or the defendant whose point of view we’re living in can see it and hear it. And one way to avoid those kind of cliché stock characters is to consider that perhaps maybe they deserve some point of view. But then you got to make space. John: Yeah. You got to make space and make sure that you’re not creating an expectation with the audience that your movie will not be able to match. Craig: Correct. Correct. It’s tricky. John: Let’s talk about general guidelines for when it makes sense to limit point of view and when it makes sense to broaden out point of view. So, some benefits to limiting POV is it does make your audience identify very closely with whoever that central character is. Generally, if you’re limiting your point of view to one character, like in a Harry Potter situation, you’re going to identify very closely with Harry Potter because he’s in every scene so it’s driving everything. And particularly, if you have a character whose experience may be different than sort of your audiences, it can be great to limit POV, because then you’re seeing everything through his or her eyes. And so if you have a tale of racism and you’re seeing it through this Black character’s eyes, I think an audience might be able to understand and empathize with it in ways they wouldn’t see otherwise, because we so closely identify with this central character. That’s a huge advantage to that. It really focuses your storytelling, because you’re only providing information that that character can actually get to. And so that’s helpful. So anything that the audience wants to know, the character needs to know too. And so you’re following in his or her footsteps as they’re going out and trying to do these things. And so we identify very closely with characters if we limit the POV to those characters. On the other hand, if you broaden POV, suddenly your movie can feel much more expansive, because suddenly you can cut to Egypt, you can cut to Morocco. You can see all these different parts of the world, and so you establish new characters when you want to establish them. That’s hugely helpful too. If you’re the kind of bigger, epic-scale story, that makes sense. If you’re Game of Thrones, you don’t want to limit it to one character’s point of view, because you have to be able to jump around and have different characters be the hero of one story and the villain of another. Craig: Perfect thing to mention, Game of Thrones, because when people talk about George R. R. Martin’s books, they literally refer to point of view characters. So, generally speaking in his chapters there is a character that is sort of the point of view. And they get an inner life. They have an inner voice. And the events unfold through their eyes and their experience. And you’re absolutely right. Any kind of epic story demands it, I think. And you should kind of know, I think, from the sort of story you’re telling, whether or not you want to be expansive in your points of view or you want to be limited. But some other things to think about beyond just scale is how much your character is meant to know. If there’s certain kinds of mystery, or if there’s a certain sense of powerlessness, generally speaking, it’s great to side your perspective with characters that have less power and less knowledge, because then there’s more to learn, and there’s more to know. And that’s interesting. And it’s instantly sympathetic. We don’t really want to share the POV of people that know a lot or are in control. We don’t need Morpheus’s POV really ever. We just don’t need it, except maybe, for instance, in the scene where he needs to break free from the agents and run and jump. We are in his perspective, because at that moment he is very powerless. He is weak. And he isn’t really sure he’s going to make it or not. There you go. John: Yeah. A crucial example. So most of what we’ve been talking about has been sort of movie point of view and the things about which character the camera is on. Those are sort of movie conversations. But point of view is always a part of fiction. It’s always been one of the classic things we talked about. Going back to Pride and Prejudice, we are at Elizabeth Bennett’s point of view and not Darcy’s point of view. And we see the story through her eyes rather than his eyes. Sometimes, just like in movies, it’s good to change point of view. It’s good to change point of view in books as well. The first Arlo Finch book is entirely from Arlo’s point of view. We only know information that Arlo knows. And if there’s information I had to get in there, I had to have Arlo be present for that information to come out. The second book, for reasons that become clear when you actually read the second book, we do break POV at one point in the story. And my editor was really nervous about this, but then as we talked through it, it actually makes sense that we break POV, and suddenly the rules of sort of who we’re allowed to follow in the world shift a bit. But hopefully by that point, you are comfortable enough with the characters that I’m breaking POV to that it makes sense. Craig: Yeah. I can’t remember which Harry Potter book began with an entirely different POV of somebody coming home and finding Voldemort in his house or something. It fills the world out. And partly, it also creates a complex reading experience, because we are asked as readers to build little walls in our mind. Like, “Okay, I just learned something and saw something, but the character whose POV I’m going to be following for the rest of the book has not been there or seen that. I’m going to put a little wall between them. They don’t know that stuff.” And then ideally, the story at the end will link it together, and then they will learn it, and in the learning of it, will learn something else and so on and so forth. But it’s exciting. You just have to do it really deliberately. That’s the thing. We always say everything is about being specific and being intentional. As long as you know what you’re doing and why, it should work. John: It should work. And exactly the scenario you described, where a story starts with a different character’s POV before going back to the hero, that’s a very classic movie thing as well. So how many movies have you seen that start with some rando people you’re never going to see again? They’re establishing some nature of the world or some nature of the fundamental problem before we get to our main characters. That’s classic. Craig: Yeah. Beginning of Scream, for instance. We never see Drew Barrymore again, but it’s entirely from her point of view. John: Absolutely. So it’s teaching us how to watch the movie. So don’t feel like you’re breaking POV just to do that introduction to the world thing. That’s very classic. Or the tag at the end. That’s also well established. Craig: Yep. I really do believe that honestly that’s worth one year of film school. John: Done. [Episode 472 clip] John: Let us shift gears completely, because I want to talk about a very crafty kind of issue here. The project I’m working on right now has characters who are experiencing some really big emotions. You and I, Craig, haven’t talked a lot about the inner emotional life of characters. We talk about sort of the emotional effect we’re trying to get in readers and viewers, but I want to talk about what characters are feeling, because what characters are feeling so often impacts what they can do in a scene, how they would express themselves, literally what actions they would take. And so to set us up I wanted to play a clip from Westworld. And so this is Evan Rachel Wood. I think this was from the first season. And what I love about it is that she’s so emotional, and then because she’s a robot, she can just turn it off. Craig: What would you know about that? John: I set myself up for that. Evan Rachel Wood: My parents. They hurt them. Jeffrey Wright: Limit your emotional affect please. What happened next? Evan: Then they killed them. And then I ran. Everyone I cared about is gone. And it hurts so badly. Jeffrey: I can make that feeling go away if you like. Evan: Why would I want that? The pain. Their loss. It’s all I have left of them. You think the grief will make you smaller and sad, like your heart will collapse in on itself, but it doesn’t. I feel spaces opening up inside of me. Like a building with rooms I’ve never explored. John: I’ll put a link in the show notes for that too, so you can see what she’s doing in the scene. What I like so much about that is you look at how she is at the start of that scene and she’s so emotional. She has a hard time getting those words out. And then when she’s told stop being emotional, it brings her way back down, and she can actually speak the words that she couldn’t otherwise say. And that’s so true, I find, both in my own real life – as I get in these heightened emotional states, I can’t express myself the way I would want to – but also in the characters I write. I feel when I know what a character is going through inside their head, it completely changes how they’re going to be acting in that scene. Craig: Yeah. That’s a pretty great clip. Evan Rachel Wood is an outstanding actor. And one thing that’s fascinating about that is that Jeffrey Wright, who is playing there against her, who is also a spectacular actor, what he says is, “Limit your emotional affect,” not eliminate it. Because she’s a robot, she can dial it from an eight to a three. By the way, what he’s doing there essentially is what directors are doing all the time on a set. They walk over to an actor, “Great, let’s just roll it back. Let’s just pull it back five points and see what that’s like.” Because then what happens is you’re still feeling emotion. She still has a quavering in her voice. You can still feel her pain. But it’s like she experienced it three hours ago, and now she’s starting to get a handle on it, as opposed to she’s in the middle of it. First things first when you’re thinking about your character’s emotional state is ask why are they experiencing these emotions and how distant are they from the source of it, because that’s going to be a huge indication to you about how you ought to be pitching them. John: Absolutely. So one of the things you learn as you’re directing actors is to talk about verbs rather than adjectives. Gives them a thing to do rather than sort of a description of how they are supposed to be feeling, because it’s very hard to feel a thing. And what I might describe as being happy is a thousand different things. But if I describe, “Invite the other character into the space. Share your joy with them,” that’s a thing that an actor can actually play. Be thinking about sort of not only what is causing this emotional state but what is the actual physicality of that emotional state. What’s happening in there? And it’s not rational. And that’s a hard thing to grasp is that we always talk about what characters want, what characters are after. This isn’t really the same kind of thing. It’s an inner emotional drive. Something they cannot actually control. It’s more their lizard brain doing a thing. So what may be useful is imagine that you’re at a party, and how differently you’d act or speak if, for example, you were terrified of someone in the room, or if you were ravenously hungry, if you were ashamed about what you were wearing, if you were proud of the person this party was about, if you were disgusted by the level of filth in the room. Those are all sort of primal things that are happening. And if you’re experiencing those emotions, the affect is going to be different. You’re going to do different things. You’re going to say different things. You’re going to position yourself in the room differently. So getting an emotional register for each of the characters in a scene can be super important in terms of figuring out how this scene is actually going to play out. And I do want to stress that we really are talking about scene work here. It’s not overall story plotting. It’s not even sort of sequence work. It’s very much, in this moment right now, what is going to be the next thing the character says, the next thing the character does. Craig: Yeah. It’s also what people came for. You’re absolutely right to distinguish between the normal acting place and the normal writing place as one of intention. I want something, so I’m going to figure out how to get it, whether it’s to get your attention or have you fall in love with me or stop the bomb from exploding, whatever it is. That’s the rational stuff that actors go through. And that’s the rational stuff you’re writing in there. That is the plot. But what people come for is the emotion, because the emotion is when the character doesn’t want anything. They are simply expressing the truth about what they are experiencing in the moment. And that is the part we connect with. We do not connect with the intricacies of disarming a bomb. We connect with fear. We connect with the anticipation of terrible loss, the foreshadowing of grief. That’s what we imagine. If you’re a parent, you know this feeling. You put your kid on a bicycle for the first time, and whether you realize it or not, your heart beats a little bit faster, because you are anticipating them falling and getting hurt. So that’s the truth. And that’s what we all experience. That is the universal nature of this. That’s the part people come for. So our job is to understand very realistically what somebody would be feeling in that moment, because while audiences will forgive things like… The first movie I ever had in theaters was a movie called Rocket Man. Not the Elton John story. This was 1998 silly children’s comedy, Rocket Man. And the director, I didn’t get along with. I just didn’t appreciate his creative instincts. And one of the things he did, I guess, when he was shooting was, there were all these scenes were these astronauts were walking around on Mars, and the visors and the helmets were causing reflections from the lights, so he said, “Let’s just remove those visors, and we’ll put them in later with visual effects,” because he thought that would be easy to do. And then later, Disney was like, “This movie’s not even that great. We’re not spending more money on it.” So there are scenes in the finished movie where they are walking around on Mars and there’s no visor in their helmet. And audiences will forgive that, because they know on some level these people aren’t really on Mars and who cares. But here’s what they will never forgive. An inappropriate emotional response. Because they know what feels real and what doesn’t. That’s where they will kill you. So our job is to be as realistic as possible in those moments to avoid the extremes of melodrama, where things start to get funny because they’re so wildly too big, or to avoid the constraint of, I guess we would call it unnatural emotional response, where things don’t connect right or simply aren’t there at all. Is it better to underplay emotion than overplay? Usually. Can you underplay emotion to the point where it’s just not there and the whole thing feels kind of dead and battened down with cotton? Yup. John: Oh, we’ve seen those movies. We’ve seen those cuts where it just got too stripped down. It sounds like we could be talking about actors and how actors create their performance. And this is not a podcast about acting. But there is such a shared body of intention here. And it doesn’t even necessarily go through the director. Because we are the first actors for all of these characters. And so we have to be able to get inside their emotional states and be able to understand what it feels like to be in that moment, you know, experiencing these things, so we can see what happens next. And so often when I find things are being forced, or when I don’t believe the reality of stuff, I feel like the writer is dictating, “Okay, this is the next emotional thing you’re going to hit,” rather than actually putting themselves in the position of that character and seeing what happens next and actually just watching and listening to what naturally does happen next. Craig: Yes. John: It’s always a balancing act there. Craig: The mistake I think a lot of writers make is to think, “I want the audience to feel sad, so let me make my character sad.” That’s not what makes us sad. John: No. Craig: At all. John: No. Craig: There are times when the character should be sad, but that’s not what makes us sad. John: Absolutely. And so often the lesson you learn is that if you want the audience to feel emotional and sad, limiting what we see of that character feeling that way or how that character externalizes that thing is often more effective. The character holding back tears generally will generate more tears from the audience than the character who is actually crying, because we put ourselves in that position and we are sort of crying for them. Craig: Yes. And sometimes there’s a situation where the actors, the characters may not be feeling an enormous amount emotionally, but what they’re doing is something we can empathize with so deeply that it makes us cry. There’s a moment in Chernobyl where Jessie Buckley’s character is with her husband, who is a firefighter, and he is dying, clearly, evidently, and disgustingly. And she’s right next to him, and she tells him that they’re going to have a baby. Obviously, she knows this. She’s not super emotional in that moment. And he sort of just takes her hand, and he’s not super emotional. He’s just pleased with this news. But I cry when I look at it, because I feel such terrible empathy for them. And it’s hard to even explain, to parse out exactly why that makes me so sad. Is it that she’s smiling and he’s smiling and they’re experiencing this moment of joy and hope, even though he’s perishing in front of her? Is that what it is? It’s hard to say. But what I do know is that if I try to make people cry then it just gets dumb. So you find your moments. For instance, Jessie, who is a spectacularly good actor and just has amazing instincts, there are moments in the show where she is very emotional. And I don’t necessarily feel emotional in that moment. What I feel is alignment with her, like, “Yes, I’m glad you’re angry. Yes, of course you’d be scared. Yes, of course you’re upset.” John: That comes back to empathy, because you successfully placed us as the viewer into her position, so we are seeing the story from her point of view. And that is not just the intellectual point of view, but the emotional point of view. And that’s why we’re feeling what we’re feeling. We are identifying with her. Craig: Yes. John: But let’s talk about sort of how writers can be thinking about these emotions. I want to get back to your example of you’re the parent whose kid is riding off on the bike for the first time and you know they’re going to fall. That is such a specific example. And the reason you were able to summon that is, when that happened, you were probably kind of recording that. A little red light went off in the corner, “Okay, this emotional thing that I’m experiencing, this is real. This is a thing that I can hold onto. It’s in my toolbox right now.” A thing I’ve been doing since the start of the pandemic is I started doing Head Space, the meditation app. And one of the things it forces you to do is to really evaluate what are you feeling right now at this moment. And when you get good at being able to analyze what are you actually feeling, you can start to think like, “Okay, what would it feel like to be proud of this moment? What would it feel like to be angry or fearful?” And you can start to distill what that emotion is like independent of the actual cause. And sometimes as a writer, you have to be able to do that. So you actually say, “Okay, what is the moment,” back to Evan Rachel Wood, “with a little bit more fear dialed in? What is this moment like with a little bit more dread or curiosity dialed in?” Because with that, you’re like a musician putting together the chords and figuring out like, okay, what is the best version of this moment, this scene, this character’s experience in this moment because of the emotions that I’m aware of and able to apply. Craig: That’s right. Then you have the difficult job of figuring out how that would work within the tone of whatever you’re doing. Because every piece has a different tone. And over time, the way we generally make and then absorb culture changes. When you watch action movies from the ‘80s, what you will generally see are a lot of people behaving in ways that are emotionally insane. Just insane. You know, stuff blows up and they’re just like, “Wow, should have worn my sunglasses.” Whatever the dumb crap is. I mean, Arnold Schwarzenegger would quip after murdering people. Who does that? You just murdered a human being. I mean, he deserved it. He was a bad guy. But you killed him, and then you have a little snappy joke that’s a pun based on the manner in which you killed him. That’s the tone of that. As we’ve kind of gone on, things do change. And generally speaking, our culture has become more emotionally expressive and in touch. I think it’s generally a good thing, of course. And we are, all of us living in a post-therapy age, where many people have gone to therapy, or they’ve just read books like Chicken Soup for the Soul or whatever it is. We’ve been absorbing certain things. And so now when we write this stuff, part of what has to happen is, you, the author, cannot be afraid of your own emotions. And you can’t be afraid to confront how you felt in moments. And that means being honest with yourself and understanding that when we go to the movies… So forget about you wanting to project some image of yourself to the world. It would be cool to project John Milius to the world, because John Milius is super cool and everything. But I’m not John Milius. And I just don’t write tough like that. I just don’t. I kind of do the opposite. And so you have to kind of forget about projecting some perfectly strong, invulnerable sense of yourself to the world, and instead recognize that everybody who is sitting in there wants to feel comforted by a created human being’s weakness and their triumph over that weakness, because that’s inspiring to them. And if you want to look at one genre that encapsulates that the most, the embracing of the emotional self, particularly the emotional male self, it is Marvel movies, because superhero movies were about these sort of emotionally distant people, because they were perfected. And now they’re tormented, which reflects Marvel. John: Now it’s about Tony Stark’s relationship with Peter Parker. It’s very specific character interactions is why we go to these superhero movies, especially the Marvel movies. Craig: Exactly. So you have to get it right. That’s the challenge. This is I think probably where writers will fall down more than anywhere else, because they actually don’t understand their own selves, so they don’t know what a character should feel. How many times in our Three Page Challenges have we said, “Why is this person speaking in a complete sentence when somebody has a knife to their throat?” You can’t. You just can’t. There’s a lack of emotional truth. John: Yeah. And so as you’re talking with actors, and they can be frustrated, like, “I don’t know how to do this scene. This isn’t tracking for me,” a lot of times, what it is, they’re saying, “I don’t know how to get from A to E here. You’re not giving me the structure to get from place to place.” And maybe you just didn’t build that, or maybe there’s a way there that you didn’t see before. As writers, we’re not documentarians. So we’re not necessarily creating scenes that are completely emotionally true to how they would happen in real life. There’s going to be optimization, and it’s going to move faster, and people are going to have to make transitions within the course of a scene that they probably would not do in real life. But that’s the art of it. That’s how you are sanding off the edges and getting there a little bit quicker. But you have to understand what the reality would look like first before you try to optimize it. Craig: Correct. That is absolutely correct. [Episode 151 clip] John: So Craig, what motivated this talk of liars and liars in scripts? Craig: I’m working on a movie right now. Essentially, it’s a whodunit. And when you start to investigate the world of whodunits, you… I’ve been reading a ton of Agatha Christie. I’ve always been a Doyle fan. And I’ve always been a Poe fan. Poe is really the kind of inventor of the modern whodunit detective story. For this kind of movie, I felt that Agatha Christie’s genre was the most appropriate, and so I’ve been just reading a lot of Agatha Christie. And one thing that I’ve noticed is all of the characters, with the exception of the detective, are liars. Part of the fun of a good mystery is that when you ask the question whodunit, the answer is any one of these people could have done it. And we think that they could have done it in part because perhaps they all had motive, they all have opportunity, but more importantly, they are all lying. And it’s lying that makes us suspect them. But as I started to think about this, I realized, in fact everyone is a liar to some extent or another. All humans are liars. Lying is part of the human condition. But there are different kinds of liars. And there’s different kinds of lying. And when we talk sometimes about new writers who are writing and the characters, we’ll say, “Oh, everything seems on the nose,” or, “There’s not enough subtext.” In a weird way, I think sometimes the mistake people are making is that they’re writing people, and those people aren’t lying. They’re writing truth-tellers. John: Yes. Craig: And it’s just less interesting. So I wanted to talk about how useful it is to think of your characters as liars, but also the different grades or categories of lying and lying characters that you’ll find. John: I think it also feeds into our concept of motivation. Why a person is saying the things that they want other people to believe is key to understanding who they are in a scene and overall in the film itself. Craig: That’s right. The idea of drama and of experiencing a narrative where humans move through it and transform is that they are not at the end who they were in the beginning. And if they were just truth-tellers in the beginning, naturally, they’re simply going to say, “Well, here’s the situation. I’m very scared of this. I’m scared of growing up, and I’m scared of telling you that I love you, but I do love you. And I’m hoping that by behaving better, I will in fact grow up, and whether I get you or not, I will be a better person.” [Yawns] Movie over. Everyone has to be concealing something in some way. But then there are characters who are lying for other reasons. Maybe not such understandable or empathetic, or sympathetic, I should say, reasons. So, let’s talk about some of the different kinds of lying there is. The most useful kind to me is self-deception. I think every protagonist to some level or another is engaging in self-deception. We’ll say the character has an arc. It is a bad character, a dramatically unsatisfying character who has complete access to his or her emotional states, weakness, flaws, and can pinpoint them perfectly, and then throughout the course of the movie, go about and achieve them. One of my favorite examples of this, because it was done so cannily, is Jerry Maguire. I honestly think that Cameron Crowe pulled off one of the most brilliant self-delusional moves of all time. We’ll see sometimes in comedy, “Hang a lantern on it.” If you have something that seems a little wonky in your story, just go for it and embrace it, and people feel like it’s intentional. John: Yeah. Call it out to the audience, so the audience knows that you recognize that it’s there. Craig: That’s right. So, what does he do with this character of Jerry Maguire? The movie begins with a man who, in a moment of frustration, writes a manifesto about the kind of person that is a good person. But he is still engaged in a very high level of self-delusion. He is in fact not that person. Even the writing of that manifesto is a manifestation of his self-delusion. He’s actually a bad person. The manifesto itself is really more of a temper tantrum, and nothing that he actually thinks he should or could do. As a result of writing that manifesto, he loses his job and all of his clients except for two. And actually, really what it comes down to is one. And then must struggle over the course of the movie, clinging all the while to his self-delusions, to finally get to the place where he realizes, “Oh my god, I’m supposed to be the person I wrote about in that manifesto.” That’s how strong self-delusion is. Even when you can write down the truth of yourself, you do not believe it. John: Self-delusion is commonly the starting place for a movie where the journey is for the character to come upon emotional honesty, emotional authenticity. And so when we talk about how useful it is for a character to lie, that’s not that the movie should be lying. It’s that the character needs to have progress from this inauthentic state to an authentic state at the end, and Jerry Maguire is a great example of that. Craig: Yeah. And I think all protagonists to some level or another have a self-delusion. If they have an arc, it means they have a self-delusion. Going into the world of animation, the character of Marlin in Finding Nemo, he is honest to himself to a point. He honestly believes that he must take care of Nemo at all costs. But he’s deluding himself, because somewhere down there is access to a truth, an inherent truth, that this can’t last. The boy will grow up. He must let him go. John: Even in movies that are more action-based or sort of have more classically sort of like here’s the hero protagonist, you often see that the hero at the start of the movie is really kind of a series of poses. It’s acting the part of the hero, but it doesn’t actually have the stuff inside him, because he hasn’t been tested in ways to really show what it is that matters to him. Craig: That’s right. John: What it is that is sort of unique to his own journey. Craig: Yeah, in fact, that can start to give you a clue. Everybody is afraid of the second act, but this gives you a clue to your second act. What situations should this person go through so that their own delusion can be laid bare to them. John: Their normal way of doing things and the normal person they’re presenting out into the world is called out in a way or is ineffective in a way, and they’re forced to find a new identity. Craig: Right. And this works in part because it is the function of drama to… Why we are attracted to drama is because it illuminates our lives. All of us are delusional. John: Yes. Craig: Everyone on the planet is delusional. We are all walking around either ignoring something in ourselves, willfully or subconsciously, or simply misunderstanding ourselves. No matter how much therapy you go through, there will always be a glitch in the system, because we’re made of meat. We are rational to a point, but the part of us that is irrational is not accessible by the rational, so therefore it’s happening out of our control. John: I would also question whether if you got rid of all your self-delusions, if you got rid of all of the lies, would there even be a person left underneath there? I think so many cases, our personalities and sort of who we perceive ourselves to be is a narrative that is carefully constructed based on experiences, based on our hopes, based on our dreams. And you are sort of a story. And a story is made up of some fabrications. Craig: That’s right. Just as you can’t step into the same river twice, every new realization you have changes your mind. It changes who you are and gives birth to a new level of potential self-delusion. One hopes that you can improve your life. Know thyself is a great goal. But you’re right, it’s actually an impossibility to truly 100% know yourself. Let’s get really heavy for a second. Are you familiar with Gödel’s theorem? John: I don’t know Gödel’s theorem. Tell me. Craig: First of all, a great book. This is my One Cool Thing for every day. Gödel, Escher, Bach. It’s an incredible book. Douglas, I want to say it’s Douglas Hofstadter I believe is the… He wrote this I believe in the ’80s, this brilliant, mind-boggling book that goes into mathematics, artificial intelligence, logic, and ranges from Alice in Wonderland to the music of Bach, to the drawings of Escher, and then interestingly in to the work of Gödel. And Gödel had this very famous mathematical theorem. And essentially what it said is, for any given system of mathematics… In math, I don’t know if you remember, you can prove things. John: Yes. Absolutely. That’s crucial. Craig: Do you remember that? Right. So you have a system of rules, and then somebody gives you an assertion. And then you can create a proof of that assertion using the rules, and you can prove that it is true, and that’s important. John: Yes. Craig: What his theorem said was, for any system of mathematics, there will always be things that are true that cannot be proven. And that’s kind of mind-boggling in and of itself. And it gets to this whole idea of recursion, all the rest. But what it really comes down to is our brains are closed systems. There will always be things that are true that our brain in its current state simply can’t prove. You’re right; self-deception is inherent to the human condition. So, wonderful thing to think about as you’re creating your character. John: And if you go in further, if you actually were to strip away everything you think about yourself, your entire narrative… I’ll put a link in too. Datura. I may be pronouncing it wrong. Craig: Oh, god. John: But you know that drug? Craig: The worst. John: It apparently just lays you completely bare, and you sort of see yourself and your wholeness and all of your flaws. And very few people can withstand that sort of spotlight of scrutiny. Craig: That’s right. John: When you lose yourself, you lose all of your lies. Craig: Precisely. And that’s why the journey for a character that is struggling with their self-deception is difficult. See, bad screenwriting teachers will always talk in terms of bloodless structure, because that’s all they understand. So, they’ll say things like, “It’s important that your hero face obstacles.” Why? Why? Let’s just start with these really fundamental questions. I remember I took a philosophy class in college, and the professor asked a question. “It’s good to know that things are true, but why? Why is truth better than not truth?” [laughs] Then you go, “Huh, I guess I should probably think about that.” Why obstacles? Because if there are no obstacles… The obstacles aren’t the point. The obstacles are the symptom of the difficulty of undoing your self-deception. It’s hard. John: All right. So, self-deception is a key thing. What other types of lies do you think are fundamental for storytellers? Craig: So, that’s the first, and that’s the most common class. Then there’s this second class that doesn’t apply to every character. And I call this the manipulators. These are people who lie for a purpose. They’re lying for an external purpose. And we can break them out into two subgroups. There is the protective manipulators, and there are the manipulators who are lying for gain. So, protective liars are people that lie in order to avoid pain or hurt or to maintain some lifestyle that is their best option. John: So, they’re not trying to deceive themselves. They’re trying to deceive other people, to either protect what they have or protect the things they love. Craig: Right. And you and I have both written movies that have this. Big Fish, Edward Bloom, he’s a protective liar. He is lying because it’s helpful to him. He’s certainly lying more than the average person. He’s not lying to get rich. John: No. Craig: And he’s not self-delusional. He’s lying purposely, but in order to protect himself on some level. John: Yeah. I would push a little bit back on protect himself. The only thing he can pass on is his vision of how the world should be, so he’s attempting to use these fabrications in order to create an idealized world, a vision for what he wants for his son. Craig: Yeah. And I actually think that that’s consistent with protecting yourself, in the sense that if you don’t do it, then you feel inept as a father, that you’ve somehow failed, that this is something he needs to do for his son. In Identity Thief, the character of Diana lies because she is lonely and unloved, and the only way she can survive is by constantly lying. Constantly. It’s become a crutch. And these characters can be very sympathetic, actually. They’re frustrating. They’re frustrating, and that’s fun. They create conflict, which we love, of course. And they also keep the audience guessing, which we love. And then, of course, they have the audience begin to connect with that person. The audience naturally tries to make sense of things. It’s part of what we do as human beings. So, don’t try and make sense of why this person is doing it, and now they’re doing your work for you. They are engaged. And your job when you finally explain why is to explain why in a way that is satisfying to them, that does make sense. John: Absolutely. So, you’re describing the character’s secrets and lies, which is really the same thing. There is something that they’re not showing. There are cards they are holding back. And that’s a way of engaging the audience’s curiosity. Craig: Correct. John: And anything that makes your audience lean in to the story rather than sit back is a very good thing. Craig: That’s right. Now, the second sub-heading under manipulators are the people who lie for gain. And these are typically villains. Sometimes, however, they’re heroes. For instance, Danny Ocean lies constantly for gain. He’s a thief. But, you’ll take a look at a villain like Hans Gruber in Die Hard. Wonderful liar. Wonderful, brilliant liar, and lying for gain. He also too is a thief. These people who lie for gain are oftentimes much better liars than the people who lie to protect themselves or conceal a personal secret. And they’re definitely better liars than people who are simply self-delusional. They’re professional liars. So, you get to write somebody who is not only screwing with the people around them, but screwing with the audience, and this is important. John: When you say they’re lying for gain, it’s not just necessarily monetary gain. If you look at Jeff Bridge’s character in Jagged Edge, that’s a character who is lying with a very specific agenda. He’s trying to protect himself, but he gets so much more by establishing and maintaining this lie. It’s his natural way of going through the world is that lie. Craig: Absolutely. And sometimes the reason, the gain is actually quite noble. Flick, the ant, goes and gets these guys to help save the village, but they’re just circus performers. And this lie has to be maintained until finally it’s laid bare. There are all sorts of ways that people can lie for gain, but when they do so, they have to do so with some skill. And therefore, as a writer, you have to actually think like a manipulative liar here who is trying to get something. The truth is no longer important. What’s far more important is what you have to say. And the audience shouldn’t always know. One of the great things about Ocean’s Eleven is that they lie to each other. They lie to Matt Damon. Not everybody knows what’s going on. And then the movie lies to us through their perspective, because we think we’re seeing something we’re not, and then they reveal how they’ve lied. So, that gives you so many opportunities. John: I think the challenge for a screenwriter is recognizing when it is good to let the audience in and see the liar doing his work, because that can be really rewarding to see somebody be really good at the thing they’re doing, and when you’re better off holding back and keeping the audience in the same point of view as all the other characters, where they’re being manipulated as well. Craig: Yes. And the revelation of their lies should have the punch of some kind of climactic feel, because if you reveal it too soon, you’ll simply lose interest. I mean, we understand the basic lie of Hans Gruber fairly early on, but there’s this other lie that he’s hiding from his own guys, of what’s going to happen with that last bit of security lock. He hasn’t told them, which is actually kind of great. I mean, because look, realistically if you were leading a gang of henchmen into a building to rob it, and you knew that there were seven things you had to get through, and the last one was an impossible-to-break electromagnetic seal on the vault, you would say, “Don’t worry. What we’re going to do is we’re going to stage a terrorist attack. Eventually, they’ll follow the handbook, turn off all the power, and that will open the thing for us. You ask for a miracle, I give you the FBI.” But he doesn’t tell them. John: You like at Keyser Söze at the end of The Usual Suspects, and you know that he is manipulative, you know that you can’t trust him, but you didn’t know that everything you’re experiencing was a lie. And it was the right choice to save that reveal to the very, very end. The punch line to the joke is the revelation of this last lie. Craig: Right. John: I’m sure those decisions, he probably went back and forth about like, “If we revealed a little bit earlier, then we would have the tension about will he get caught.” And this was the decision like, nope, that the whole movie has to be set up to this point. Craig: Yes. Exactly. And that’s a great segue to our next category, because Keyser Söze is a perfect example of somebody that manipulates and lies for gain. He’s also a very bad person. But his badness isn’t his lying. His badness is that he’s a murderer. The lying is done to get him gain for his other badness, which is murdering. But then there’s the last category of liar, and this is the worst liar, and these are always villains. And these are some of the scariest characters you can create. They are bad, bad people. These are the chaotic, pathological liars. John: Yes. Craig: These are the people that lie because they love trouble. And they lie to create strife and drama. They can’t control their lying. I don’t think they’re alive unless they’re lying. I don’t think they even know what the truth is. So the character that often comes to mind in this case is the latest incarnation of the Joker, the Heath Ledger Joker. One thing that I thought was just – I think everybody thought it was pretty amazing – in Dark Knight was when the character the Joker explains how he got his facial scars. And it was very scary, very revealing confession of a trauma. John: It made you almost sympathetic for a moment. Craig: It did. And then there is another scene later where he explains to somebody else how he got his scars, and it is just as compelling, and just as terrifying, and just as true feeling, but it’s a completely different story. John: Yes. Craig: And that’s when you realize this man is just a liar. John: Yeah, he’s truly a sociopath. A psychopath. I mean, all he can sort of do is lie. It’s the air he breathes. If he says hello, that’s a lie. Craig: That’s right. And these characters are very difficult to write, because for the most part, we aren’t them. I mean, occasionally – god help us – we will run into these people. John: I worked for a person. I worked for one of those people. Craig: There you go. And part of the problem is that they’re so good that you don’t really know for a while what’s happening. And then eventually, it becomes clear, and then part of the struggle is it’s hard to wrap your mind around the fact that another person is actually… You, like the audience, want to make sense of them. But you can’t, because they are operating in a way that is… Frankly, they don’t even care about their own destruction, you see? The Joker doesn’t care if he lives or dies. He has no interest in that. He loves chaos. He loves the chaos that lying can bring. And you’ll see these characters sometimes in noir. These characters will skew towards female, because when you put it in a man you immediately start to think, “My god, he’s going to just start stabbing, shooting, killing, and all the rest,” whereas women can maybe just scramble your brain and make you second guess your own name and all the rest of it. And then finally, Bogart sends you up the river. But liars, pathological liars are very scary people. And if you’re going to write one, you just have to know that the movie will be deeply infected by them, that they are going to take over. John: It’s a movie that hasn’t come out yet, but Kristen Wiig is terrific in a comedy I saw – I guess you’d call it a comedy, kind of a comedy, kind of a drama – called Welcome to Me. It should be out later this year. And she’s not a psychopath, but it’s one of the rare cases where I’ve seen just a chaotic, manipulative person really at the center of a film, where she is supposed to be the protagonist, but she honestly kind of can’t protagonate in a meaningful way. Craig: Right. John: It’s a really challenging task for a writer and for an actress to put that person at the very center of a movie and not have that person be the villain. Craig: Of course, because the protagonist at some basic level is trying to achieve something. We ask simple questions of our heroes. What do you want? What are you willing to do to get it? What scares you? This or that. What does the pathological, chaotic liar want? Trouble. John: Yes. Craig: That’s what they want. They want trouble. So, the only person I’ve written like this, and I loved writing him, was Mr. Chow. John: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Craig: Mr. Chow is a chaotic, pathological liar. He does not care if he lives or dies. In fact, he thinks it’s awesome. He just loves trouble. But because he’s so comic, and also embodied in this kind of very small, physically frail man, it’s funny. John: But if you tried to have the Mr. Chow movie, good luck. It’s very, very challenging to put that person in the center of a movie and have them do any of the kinds of things you want a person at the center of a movie to be able to do. Craig: Absolutely. In fact, Todd and I talked for a bit about the idea of what a Mr. Chow movie would look like. And it was totally different, because it was the darkest thing imaginable. And I remember we had this one idea for a scene that sort of sums it up. Mr. Chow comes home to see his elderly father. And he walks in, and his old, old father looks up at him and says something like, “Leslie, you returned to us. You came back.” And Mr. Chow walks over to him and then cuts his throat. And as his father is dying, his father looks up at him and says, “Good job,” because that’s the only… That’s how Mr. Chow is born. It’s just pure awful chaos and darkness, willful self-destruction. The only goal there is is to blow up the world. John: Yeah. Those characters are almost un-human, because they don’t work in our normal ways. Crispin Glover and I had a few conversations about taking his Thin Man character from the Charlie’s Angels movie and just doing his own movie. And ultimately, nothing will ever come of that probably. But it’s a fascinating character, but such an incredibly challenging character to put at the center of anything, because he is chaos. He’s like chaos and death in ways that’s very hard to… He’s a challenge. It’s very hard to have insight into that character, because deliberately, they’re supposed to be opaque, and you just can’t know them. Scarlett Johansson’s character in Under the Skin is a similar situation, is where she’s just this lioness. There’s just not a human. There literally is not a human underneath that. It makes it very challenging. Craig: Right. It essentially doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. There needs to be somebody in opposition to it, or they need to not be human, and that’s sort of the point, and then the purpose of the movie is to illuminate the difference between humans and non-humans. But they will infect your movie, and you have to write them carefully. They can kind of get in your head. And by all means, if you run into one of these people, go the other way. [Present] John: And hey, it’s John back again in 2024, which seems impossible to be real. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is a replay by Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to [email protected]. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to give you on single-use characters. Thanks. [Bonus Segment: Episode 467 Clip] John: OK, so Craig, this last week I was writing on a scene and I recognized that this was a scene where I created a character who is essentially single-use. This character only appears in this scene. He’s very memorable and distinctive and hopefully very funny within this scene, but story-wise this character is never going to reappear again. And not only is there not a natural reason for them to reappear again, they really can’t reappear again. Craig: Right. John: And it got me thinking about the situations in which I do have a single-use character and times when I want to make sure the characters can come back, and what our expectation is as writers and as readers and audiences when there’s a character who appears in only one scene. Craig: And generally, we’re going to try and avoid this, meaning when we do engage a single-use character, we’re doing so very carefully and very intentionally, because every actor that we bring on board, that’s an expense to the production, and somebody has to get wardrobed and costumed. And it also demands the audience’s attention. They are just going to presume that when they meet people, those people are in the movie. And the more people they meet who show up once and leave, the more frustrated they get. You keep throwing new people at them, they’re just going to stop paying attention, because they’re like, ah, none of these people are going to stay around, so why am I bothering? John: Yeah. I think people create a mental placeholder for them. And I find as I read scripts, often I’ll circle the first time a character shows up just so I can keep track of, oh, this is that person. And if I find myself circling a bunch of characters, like, oh wait, how many people are in this movie? I think you’re saying that expectation is that this person might come back, so I need to remember something about them. In some cases, especially if the scene is very dramatic or very funny, there’s kind of a misleading vividness, where it feels like, oh, this person must be important, because look how much screen time or look at what a big moment they had. And that can be a trap in and of itself. So, looking back at the scene that I wrote, I know it was the right choice to do it, and this was a scene which in its initial conception was going to have a group of people speaking, and then it became more clear that like, oh no, it should just be one person driving it, because it was going to get too diffuse if I had a bunch of people speaking in the scene. But what I was able to do is, because this scene takes place in a specific set that the hero is going to, and there’s not an expectation that they’re going to come back to it, I think I was able to make it pretty clear we don’t have an expectation that that character is ever going to be seen again. So by having it be a destination and not part of the regular home set in a way, I don’t think we’re going to plan on seeing that thing again. Craig: Yeah. One of the ways you can inoculate the audience against thinking that they’re going to keep seeing this person is… Very common use of single-use characters is they die. So, we’re not worried about them. They’re not coming back. I’m thinking of the very opening scene of the first episode of Game of Thrones. There are a bunch of guys we don’t see again. They all die. It doesn’t matter who they are. They die. That’s the point. Another way we can inoculate the audience is by making sure that our single-use character is rooted by circumstance into a position. So, we have a main character moving through a space, whether it’s an airport, or it is a department store. John: A DMV. Craig: A DMV. Somebody is stuck in their job. They’re not going anywhere. Your character moves in and then leaves. And we understand that character can’t go anywhere else except where they are. I mean, one of the greatest single-use characters of all time is Edie McClurg playing a rental car saleswoman in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. And she’s perfect. John: We wouldn’t want any more. Craig: You couldn’t ask for a better foil for Steve Martin losing his mind. And we know we’re not going to see her again, because she lives and works behind that counter and does not exist anywhere else. John: Another thing I think you need to keep in mind with these single-use characters is, always ask yourself is my hero still driving this scene, because so often you have this funny idea for a character, this funny situation, but if my hero can only react to that situation, they’re not actually in charge of it. So what you describe of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, the scene is not really about her. It’s about his frustration and what happens, what he does in response to her. It’s not about her. And so making sure that if you are going to use a single-use character, they’re not just going to take over the scene and just leave your hero, your star just facing them as an obstacle and not doing anything themselves. Craig: Yeah. There may be a tendency among new writers to try and jazz up a scene by having a waiter come over and be wacky. Nobody wants it. Nobody. John: No. Craig: Every now and then, for instance, here’s a for instance. Bronson Pinchot created a career for himself with a single-use character in Beverly Hills Cop. John: Beverly Hills Cop, yeah. Craig: And it was so good. It was so fascinating and so weird that you kind of wanted more of him. And you didn’t get more of him, because he was single-use. And you wanted more of him, and you got more of him eventually. Bronson Pinchot went on to do other things, because I think that was before he did Perfect Strangers, I think. I think it was. I’m sure somebody will write in and tell me I’m an idiot, which I often am. But the point is, every now and then you will get something like that. But don’t aim for it, because it almost never happens. And you really do want to design these single-use characters as functions for your main character. They are obstacles. They are information. They are omens. They are distractions. But they are rarely the person who is supposed to be drawing the audience’s attention. John: Yeah. So in certain circumstances, your waiter example is exactly right. Because you would say like, oh, you want every character to pop. And it’s like, yeah, but you don’t necessarily want that waiter character to pop. If the waiter needs to be there, but it’s not actually the point of the scene, you kind of want that character to be a little bit background. You want that character to be helping inform the setting, but they are kind of scene setting. They’re not actually the point of it. And they should be a little bit more like set decoration than the marquee star, because they’re going to probably pull focus away from what you actually want to be focusing on, which is probably your hero and what your hero is doing in those moments. Craig: That’s exactly right. John: So as you look at your script, if you have a lot of single-use characters, there may be something wrong. It’s not a guarantee that something is wrong, but there might be something wrong. So if there’s four scenes in your script that have major single-use characters who have multiple lines and are really doing a lot, ask yourself why. And not necessarily there’s a problem, but there could be a reason why. Maybe these characters should be combined or there’s some way in which they can come back. And you may not be spending your script time properly. Craig: I agree. It’s worth policing through. And every now and then you might find a way to maybe collapse them into one. If you have two scenes, you may be able to get away with just combining those two characters into one character. But yeah, be aware of it and try to avoid. And by the way, when possible ask yourself does this person need to talk at all. John: Oh yeah. Craig: Because the difference between a person who says one word on camera and a person who says nothing is a lot of money and also a lot of attention. John: A lot of time actually shooting, just to come around to film their lines- Craig: Exactly. John: … is hours on the day. Craig: It’s a lot. Links: Scriptnotes Episode 358 – Point of View Scriptnotes Episode 472 – Emotional States Scriptnotes Episode 151 – Secrets and Lies Scriptnotes Episode 467 – Another Word for Euphemism Gödel’s incompleteness theorems Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt! Check out the Inneresting Newsletter Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription! Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter John on Mastodon Outro by Rajesh Naroth (send us yours!) Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Email us at [email protected] You can download the episode here.The post Scriptnotes, Episode 624: Creating Empathy for Your Characters, Transcript first appeared on John August.

The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin. John: It is Episode 621 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. The past few weeks have offered up a lot of big personalities in the news, with some of these individuals dying or being fired or removed from Congress. Today on the show, we ask the most important question, of course: how would this be a biopic? Craig: Thank you for saying BAI-oh-pik and not bai-AH-pik. John: A film that is a biographic is a BAI-oh-pik, but sometimes it’s written out as without a hyphen, and it becomes bai-AH-pik. That’s not a thing. Craig: That’s not a thing. I think people are confusing it with myopic, which is understandable, but also not understandable, because it’s not like we refer to people’s bios as bai-AHs. John: No. Craig: So BAI-oh-pik, everyone. John: BAI-oh-pik. Craig: BAI-oh-pik. John: We’re making a strong stand here for that. Craig: Damn right. John: We also have some follow-up on AI and inner monologues. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, Craig, I want to pontificate about which event in history has had the biggest negative impact on human civilization. Craig: Wow. John: Yeah, so some college stoner talk here. Craig: Woo! Okay. John: Maybe think about some alt histories there. We also have some news. We have a live show coming up, this Sunday, December 17th, at 4:00 p.m. The show’s going to be sold out by the time you’re listening to this. Craig: Of course. We’re the Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts. John: It’s going to be at Dynasty Typewriter again. There will be some streaming tickets available. If you’re listening to this on the Tuesday that the episode drops, check the link in the show notes for our live show at Dynasty Typewriter. We’re going to have some great guests. It’s our holiday show. It came together kind of last minute, but we’re very excited to do it. Craig: Who is it benefiting this time? John: This time it’s benefiting the Writers Guild Foundation. Craig: Fantastic, which does excellent work supporting veterans and the writing community in general. Just so people know, it’s not the Writers Guild. It is the charitable nonprofit arm of the Writers Guild, vaguely associated. John: We’ve done a lot of shows with them, for them over the years. It’s nice to be back doing one for them. Now, before we get into the work follow-up here, apparently there’s an important bit of Melissa follow-up about Thanksgiving. Craig: We are recording this on December 3rd. It is Melissa’s birthday, by the way. Happy birthday, Melissa. John: Happy birthday, Melissa. Craig: She said, “I have follow-up for you.” John: We should say that Melissa Mazin is your wife. Craig: She is my wife, and has been for quite some time. She said, “In your last show about Thanksgiving, you said that the women,” meaning her and our friend Beth, “were not allowed to cook,” that Josh and I were the only ones who were allowed to cook. She said, “That’s not accurate. We chose not to cook.” Now, I’m going to say, in follow-up to that follow-up, we haven’t ever gotten to the place where we would need to say to her, “You’re not allowed to cook.” If she chose to cook, there would have to be a discussion. But she wanted it to be clear that she didn’t need permission. She simply wasn’t interested. John: That’s a fair distinction there. I think many cases in life, you can see, was that actually a choice, did she actually have the ability to choose to cook, and was that denied from her. Craig: She feels she had the choice. There’ll be follow-up to this one on a subsequent podcast. John: Apparently so. It’s nice to know that Melissa does listen to the show. Craig: Religiously. John: That’s great. By religiously, you mean that she listens with votive candles burning around her. Craig: With my face on them. Absolutely. John: Let’s get to some less controversial follow-up. We’ll start with David. This is back to Episode 620. We were talking about visual effects and digital doubles and AI. David writes, “The bad crowd work mentioned in Prom Pact, that was meme-ified as, quote, ‘Disney put AI people into this crowd.’ That wasn’t AI. That was just cheap VFX, likely done at the last second.” Craig: That sounds right. In looking at it again, they did seem like were sort of the kinds of people we see in previs stuff. We used to just have storyboards, and now for complicated sequences, we can do previs, where you do get these horror-looking humans. But it doesn’t matter. It’s not meant to be seen by anybody except for you, for planning purposes. I think David’s probably right there. John: I would also say that the differentiation between this is AI versus VFX is increasingly irrelevant. A lot of visual effects are going to have AI components built into them. The fact that it looks terrible doesn’t… Whether it was done with visual effects or AI, it’s not actually so important. It’s the fact that they put something on screen that look like human beings, that were not human beings. That’s the concern. Craig: If we get used to it, if we normalize it, as the kids say, we’re in trouble. Reasonable distinction to make. John: You want to take Alana here? Craig: We’ve got some follow-up from Alana. She is commenting on Episode 611, where I apparently mentioned a screenwriting format that’s divided into two columns, one for what you see and one for what you hear, and that it might make more sense for screenwriting than the current standardized format. “In Mexican telenovelas, the two-column format has been used for decades as the standard screenwriting format, though apparently in recent years, people have turned to the standard format that’s used in most places.” I wonder if perhaps the folks writing the Mexican telenovelas may have gone backwards here, because I think that makes sense. I think it makes sense. John: I was trying to find an example of Mexican telenovelas in the two-column format, because I’m familiar with two-column format, which is often used in commercials. Craig: Commercials. John: Other things, you see it there. Left-hand side is the visuals. The audio, and including the dialogue, is on the right-hand side. Yes, it does kind of make sense overall. I think our current screenplay format, which it’s all one big flow, it reads really well. You can actually read and get a sense of what’s happening very cleanly and smoothly in our current version. There’s trade-offs to doing that two-column format. Craig: I agree with you. I think maybe the two-column format might be best used by production. There are times where it’s hard to create simultaneity. We can do it in dialogue, with double dialogue, which I just sort of hate doing anyway, because it just sends the actors into a shouting over each other tizzy. But what’s almost impossible to do is simultaneous action and dialogue. You can do a little bit of it. But even then, if you put it in parentheses, it’s still like there’s a temporal thing. It’s a bit linear. The two-column format does allow for something that’s simultaneous. But I agree with you. It is easier to read. Maybe not as useful for production, but more useful for reading. John: Going back to simultaneity, even in dialogue, when Greta Gerwig was on the show, she was talking about how in her dual dialogue, she had very specific points where she wanted the actors to be overlapping and how things fit together. She put these little slashes in to indicate where these things are supposed to fall. That is the kind of micro-control you would love to be able to have. You’re always going to bump up against the hard limits of how you can portray speech on page. Craig: At some point, you are going to have to explain it to the actors and make sure they understand that this is a technical thing you’re aiming for. I find that actors in general appreciate it if you put it in that context. If you say this is actually going to be a bit technical, then they get it. If you try and convince them that this is about art, then I think reasonably, they’re like, “No. This is not how I would do it. Humans wouldn’t normally do this.” But if you put it in technical terms… John: Follow-up from Joe in New Zealand talking about Episode 615, called The Mind’s Eye. He says, “The discussion about inner monologues hit home for me, because my lovely wife has a primarily outer monologue.” Craig: What? John: “She goes about her days speaking aloud near constantly-” Craig: Oh my god. John: “… whether she’s in the room alone or in a room with me.” Craig: Oh, Joe, no. John: “Early in our relationship, it caused confusion, because she’s mostly unaware of it. To her, it feels like going from silence to talking when she addresses me, but my attention filter doesn’t always pick up on it. I thought of it as a singular quirk until we visited her family. I found myself in the living room with her, her brother, her father, and her mother, four adults all wandering around, playing with a dog, going about their business, talking constantly.” Craig: Oh my god. John: “Not to each other, not engaging, not questioning or responding, just a stream of conscious thought flowing out of each of them. It was so funny and so charming in the moment, but I definitely lied about why I was smiling and chuckling. It’s still a minor source of confusion 18 years later, but ever since then, the music of her chatter from the other side of the house is simply one of the many joys of our home.” Craig: This is the most kiwi thing I’ve ever read in my life. Joe, the good news is that your wife, who I will refer to as Mrs. Joe, found the best possible husband. The fact that you consider it a joy is why you are still married 18 years later. I would go insane. I love a quiet house. I don’t know about you. John: I like a quiet house too. It’s nice. Craig: It’s wonderful. I will admit that there are times where I have an outer monologue, and those times are very specifically when I’m working on puzzles. I will start to talk. Melissa will say, “You’re sitting there saying things like, ‘But what is that about? Why would that be there? Oh, okay, so this is absolutely this kind of… Okay, so if I do that…'” I just do it because I’m working weirdly. But if I were to do that constantly- John: You’d be divorced? Craig: No, I’d probably be the victim of a accident. John: This is reminding me of some interview I saw with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. They’re talking about their producing partner who apparently had a bit of this, and if they were driving someplace, would have to read aloud every sign that they saw, that they passed. It’s a thing. They have to externalize that stuff. Craig: Just going to have to just bear with them, I guess. John: To some degree, I am talking. I definitely talk to my dog a lot if it’s just me and Lambert. Craig: Everyone talks to their dog. John: Because they’re such good boys. Craig: Lambert is such a good boy. We got some follow-up from Greenhorn from back in 615. Greenhorn says, “My thanks to John and Craig for their helpful advice.” Oh, I remember this. This was the second unit director who was trying to claim co-writer credit. Greenhorn says, “The pushy second unit director backed down in trying to claim co-writer credit. He said a production company wanted to see a script. I said that I’d need to be paid to write a draft, and then that would also clear up any confusion over our roles. I am the writer, writing a project for you to direct. He accepted this. In his trying to squeeze writer credit, either he as a second unit director thus far was just ignorant of what was fair, as Craig suggested, or he was trying his luck. If the latter, that does not bode well for a working relationship, but I’m so keen to get my break that I’m kind of taking the view that if swimming with sharks is what it takes, so be it, so long as I can protect myself. “Now, the director said he relayed my response, which is, ‘Pay me for a draft then,’ to the production company, and they replied that they didn’t have a development budget. This company makes $100 million movies, so it’s hard to believe that they can’t afford to pay a writer to write up a script for a project they’re interested in, or is this standard practice in the US? “I’m a London-based British writer, and happily, I’ve started to get paid to write outlines and scripts, but only today I’ve had a reputable US producer put a writing brief to me. I’ve offered a take on it, which he likes, but he says he’d need a spec, not an outline. I said, ‘I’m being paid to write scripts now, so I’m not looking to write on spec.’ The UK producer I’m speaking with on other projects gladly seem to get this, but this guy just repeated that he’d need a script. It feels wrong and, frankly, insulting that he’s expecting me to give weeks or months of work without any kind of pay or commitment, or is that something that US producers can get away with when a writer hasn’t broken in yet and indeed join the WGA?” Oh, there are some facts we can lay out here, John. John: Yes, there are. Greenhorn, it’s good that you are being paid to write stuff in the UK. You should be paid to write stuff everywhere. Writing something on spec for somebody in a situation you don’t control is not a good practice to get into. For, certainly, a US-based producer, someone who’s a WGA signatory, they should not be doing that at all. Craig: It is a violation of our contract, very specifically, a violation of our minimum basic agreement, our collective bargaining agreement. It also is a violation of the WGA working rules. You are not allowed to write anything on spec for a signatory. You can pitch stuff, but you can’t write. Now, of course, Greenhorn is British. Greenhorn is not in the WGA. This US producer is fully aware of what the deal is. Can they get away with asking a British person to do this? Sure, but it’s wrong. I’m not sure that I would use the word reputable in front of this US producer’s name. If you’re reputable, you don’t ask for this, as far as I’m concerned. John: As a reminder, when we talk about writing on spec, this is a thing where you as the writer are choosing to write a project. Ideally, it’s something you own and control. It’s entirely your thing. Now, there could be situations where a producer comes, is like, “I really want to do a movie set at McDonald’s in space.” It’s like, great. You could go off and write that movie, and that person could be interested in your thing, but you control this fully. You cannot do that situation where that producer somehow owns this thing without having paid you money to write it. Craig: That’s right. If you hear an idea and think, “That sounds amazing. I really want to write this,” the deal is that producer is going to attach themselves and maybe just be a dead weight on it. But it’s yours. You own it. They don’t own the copyright. You wrote it. By the way, you shouldn’t write an outline either. You should write nothing unless you have an employment agreement. Now, that’s how we do it here with WGA writers in our business. The British system is not as protective as ours, which is odd, because they don’t have work for hire. And yet, as we’ve said many times, in exchange for giving up copyright, we get all the protections a union can afford, and it’s clear that they don’t quite have that in the UK. John: Let’s get to our main topic this week, which is how would this be a biopic. Craig: It’s not bai-AH-pik. John: Not bai-AH-pik. It’s a BAI-oh-pik. We had a whole series of deaths happen recently. People who live long lives are just fantastic. We love people living a long time. Craig: Rosalynn Carter. John: I thought we’d start with Sandra Day O’Connor. Sandra Day O’Connor, for folks who are younger or not American, she was our first female Supreme Court justice. She died recently at 93 due to complications related to advanced dementia. She’d been public about the fact that she had dementia coming on. Craig: Yes, so she has not been- John: In public life. Craig: … in the public eye for many, many years. John: She obviously was an inspiration to a generation of female lawyers, as this pioneer there. She grew up in Arizona. She was a graduate of Stanford, went to Stanford Law School. She was dating William Rehnquist while she was there. Craig: So hot. John: So hot. A belated chief justice. But then she went on to marry another classmate, John O’Connor. Craig: Well done. It has to have been an upgrade. John: When she graduated from Stanford Law School, she was turned down by law firms, because she was a woman. She had to start her own firm with her husband. She was an Arizona state senator, first female majority leader. She became a judge through the Arizona system and then was appointed by Reagan to the Supreme Court. She was a deciding vote in a lot of crucial cases. She was a conservative, but she also voted with liberal majority on other situations, in controversial cases. Probably the thing she’s most noted for is Planned Parenthood versus Casey, about a woman’s right to abortion and the term “undue burden” on a woman seeking an abortion. Undue burden felt like a good phrase to hang around a story told about her. Craig, how would this be a movie? Is there a movie? What are some comps that you’re thinking in your head? Craig: I think there is a movie. They made a movie about Ruth Ginsburg. John: Yeah, On the Basis of Sex. Craig: Correct. I actually think there may be a more interesting movie to be made about Sandra Day O’Connor. The reason why is, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a progressive firebrand who served faithfully and brilliantly for many, many years, doing exactly what she said she would do. It was one of those stories where somebody is principled, and they stay principled. They face people, obstacles and things in their way. They surmount, and they thrive. Sandra Day O’Connor was far more sneaky. She’s an interesting case of somebody who came up through what you and I knew to be Republicans. That party’s no longer in existence. Might as well call it a different name. The party of Reagan. In the “only Nixon can go to China” thing, Ronald Reagan, being the first president to appoint a female Supreme Court justice, did so under the aegis of, “This isn’t about women’s lib stuff, of course. She’s a good, staunch conservative in the Ronald Reagan mold.” Like many Supreme Court justices, including some that we have today, she began to surprise people, because while many people disagree with the lifetime appointment clause, what it does is it lets people just do what they want. John: It’s like tenure. Craig: It’s tenure. Sandra Day O’Connor showed an evolution and a wisdom and began to change the way the court was thinking. I love the fact that she dated William Rehnquist. That’s really cool, because then they’re on the court together. That’s fun. There’s cool moments and scenes like that, and also ,somebody wrestling with their own conscience and wrestling with their own principles. The fact that she had to take her husband on just to get a law firm, it’s…You can see somebody compromising until they didn’t have to anymore. That’s really interesting. John: The question of any biopic we’re going to wrestle with a lot- Craig: BAI-oh-pik. John: BAI-oh-pik, gotta say BAI-oh-pik. The question is always where are the edges of this, where do you start the story, where do you end the story. There’s that temptation to do cradle to grave, which I think is generally a mistake. Those are not going to be the most interesting moments of a life. Once you do decide what the more limited window is, do you stay within it, or do you jump out to trace other things? You’re trying to thematically fold this all together. I can imagine a Sandra Day O’Connor movie that is essentially just about the decision to appoint her and her going in through this moment and surviving that little crucible. I don’t recall her nomination process. Craig: Very smooth. John: So probably not that. Craig: Ronald Reagan had full control. John: He had control of everything. Craig: The Republican Party was a corporation back then and ran like one. The thing I would need is actually information about her marriage, because at the heart of it, you do want that relationship. You want some sort of love story. Same thing that happened with the Ginsburg story. I think also there is something brutal about the greatest minds succumbing to dementia and fading away and what that means for the person who loves her and loved her all that time. That I think is valuable, but it’s also a story of legacy, and that’s really interesting to me. There is no Ruth Bader Ginsburg without Sandra Day O’Connor. John: Absolutely. Depending on where the edges are of the story you’re telling, she was the first, but then Ginsburg is the second woman, I think, on the court. Craig: That sounds right. John: That sounds right. After she’s broken this through, what is it like to have a second woman, once you’ve actually been through there, and how do you- Craig: A woman who’s from, quote unquote, the other side. That’s where it gets interesting. The Supreme Court is notable for very odd bedfellows, weird friendships that form. Kavanaugh, fascinatingly, has become a slightly weird swing vote at times. No one can seem to predict what happens when people get on the court. John: Yeah, because important to recognize that you are appointed because they believe you’re going to have one set of facts, basically that you’re going to be the same person. But of course, people do change over time. That’s why stories are interesting. Craig: Absolutely. When you watch Supreme Court hearings, they are a study in political non-commitment. Everyone knows what’s going on. The job is to be slippery without seeming like you’re slippery, until we all vote yes, and then you’re going to do whatever you want. John: Next up, not controversial at all, Henry Kissinger died recently at 100 years of age. Craig: Yeah, I don’t think this is going to be too… Yeah. John: 100 years old. Actually, you listened to audio this last week of just him at events, coherent and talking at 100 years old, which is great. Statesman, war criminal. Movies have to make choices about how they’re going to portray the complexity of a man’s life. Craig: Kissinger is going to be a movie. That will be a movie. John: 100%. A movie or a mini series. That’s worth talking about. Craig: Movie or a mini series. John: I feel like Sandra Day O’Connor is a movie. Craig: Movie. Kissinger probably you could do a mini series. I’m sure it’s in development already. He falls into the category of monumentous people, for better or worse. He was just this fascinating character, working for a president that openly detested Jews. Here was Henry Kissinger, the most Jewish of Jews. John: Born in Germany. Born Jewish in Germany, fled- Craig: Fled. John: … with his family to New York. Craig: But notably, never lost the accent. He was always an immigrant. For Jewish people, there are levels of assimilation, like there are for any ethnicity in the United States. Having that accent, it’s just remarkable to me. That Nixon-Kissinger relationship is fascinating. There are moments, I think, where Kissinger probably did good, in the way that Lindsey Graham, in his bootlicky way, probably kept Trump from doing some terrible, terrible things. I think Kissinger probably did halt some horrible things. There were some things where he didn’t let Nixon get on the phone because he was drunk. Having somebody that is such an outsider be so inside is fascinating, from a dramatic point of view. John: Absolutely. I was going through the incredibly long Wikipedia article on him, pulling out some little moments. He became a US citizen after he joined the Army to fight in the war. There was a moment which he was just a private during the American advance into Germany and was put in charge of administration of the city of Krefeld, because he was the guy who could speak German, and actually, apparently, did a really good job. It’s just those weird moments of, oh, now we’re fighting the Germans, and you speak German, and that is the moment where you can pick up and shine. That feels like the kind of thing that is in the longer version of this, which is probably the mini series. I don’t know that this fits into the movie. Craig: I agree. That’s why you do want it to be a mini series, because for somebody like Kissinger, you want to walk away… It’s a little bit like the way Sorkin ended Social Network. You feel like you’ve known the spirit of somebody, but you also pity them and loathe them all at the same time. There’s just a core of something that’s sad there. But you can’t make a mini series merely to say, “Bad. This person bad.” That’s not the goal, I don’t think. John: We have some insight into his character, obviously. He gave a lot of interviews. This one interview I wanted to pull out was with an Italian journalist. He writes, “The cowboy doesn’t have to be courageous. All he needs is to be alone, to show others that he rides into town and does everything by himself. This amazing romantic character suits me precisely, because to be alone has always been part of my style or, if you like it, my technique, together with independence. It’s very important for me, and conviction. I’ve always been convinced I had to do whatever I’ve done.” Craig: Yes, which a lot of terrible people also have. Certainly, Kissinger did not lack any conviction. But I would suggest that that is bravado, in that everybody has a dark midnight. John: What does he fear? That’s a thing I don’t think we have a sense of yet, but what the movie or mini series would have to get into. Craig: Given the decisions he was making and the lives that he destroyed, particularly in Cambodia, but all over Southeast Asia, there had to have been moments of doubt, had to, because ultimately, it didn’t work. John: Thinking about the edges of this mini series – it’s going to be a mini series – I think you have to pick an exit point, because he ended up staying in governmental life and policy life up until months ago. He was always an advisor to people. But I don’t think that’s going to be interesting. I don’t think that’s relevant. Craig: Agreed. The meat of it ends with the fall of Nixon and the end of the Vietnam War. Then I think you jump ahead to him much, much later in life and see him trying to rehabilitate or defend or whatever, and yet still, again, there is that last moment where you have to ask, where is the humanity of this person, and what happened? How does it feel? John: So question of how many actors. Where do you break up his life? Is it three actors? Is there a 20-something, is there a 40-something, and then an old man version? Where are the splits? Craig: If I were doing it, I would probably want just one actor, if I could. If he’s very young in the war – I don’t know how old he was when he was in World War II – then it’s hard. Then you want two. But if he’s a full adult, then I think… Because also, you’re going to need to do some prosthetic work and makeup on somebody to play Kissinger. Nobody’s just walking in the room looking like him. You don’t necessarily want to drift into the whole Saturday Night Live, “Look, I look exactly like the guy.” We had to deal with this with Mikhail Gorbachev in Chernobyl. It was a tricky thing. I feel like you could probably get away with one really, really good actor, because the great bulk of the work is going to be- John: The Nixon era. Craig: … 60s and 70s. John: I’m surprised there’s not a movie out there yet. There’s a documentary Alex Gibney did, The Trials of Henry Kissinger. The comps I was thinking about for this, it’s obviously Oppenheimer, a recent version, which was focused though on one moment in his life. I think we’re expanding beyond just the one focal point. It also made me think of, there’s a Michael Jackson biopic coming out. It reminded of just like, wow, you are walking into a minefield there. Talk about someone who’s a hero and a villain. Craig: Yes, and you have to go in knowing that people are going to be critiquing this heavily no matter what you do. There’s no way that you put this out and everybody goes, “Yeah.” John: “Yeah, that’s good.” Craig: “We all agree.” It’s not as simple as something like Frost/Nixon, for instance, where Nixon’s clearly the villain, and really the hero journey there is, will David Frost get this guy to spill it or not. This is different. It’s also different than, the other thing I was thinking about was the John Adams mini series, Paul Giamatti. The point of that was that John Adams, crusty and grouchy and miserable as he was, was perhaps the most important Founding Father. That’s not the case here. This is something else. John: Simpler story perhaps, Rosalynn Carter passed away recently, also in her 90s. She was the First Lady when her husband, Jimmy Carter, was the president. Born in Plains, Georgia, married Jimmy Carter, was politically active during her husband’s entire governorship and presidency. She was very involved as a First Lady. She was in cabinet meetings in ways that was controversial at the time, although there’s precedent for that before then, of course. Active with the Equal Rights Amendments. One of the first modern feminists who was in the White House there. Portrayed as a Steel Magnolia, sweet and loving but spine of steel. Craig: Tough. John: Tough. Criticized for lack of attention paid to fashion, which I think is an interesting thing, the sexism that goes in there. Hard to point to achievements in and of herself. It’s hard to imagine the Rosalynn Carter story that isn’t largely about Jimmy Carter, although I would say a comp for me would be Priscilla by Sofia Coppola, which is looking at the wife of Elvis, rather than that whole story. Craig: But even there in Priscilla, the point is she was a child, that we have forgotten that Elvis essentially was a pedophile, I guess, by modern standards. John: Yeah, by modern standards. Craig: It’s funny. Melissa went to the Stevie Nicks concert last night. Apparently, Stevie’s still crushing it in her 70s. I was like, “Did she play Edge of Seventeen?” “Oh yeah, of course.” I’m like, “That’s about a boy who’s 16, so I guess technically it’s still pedophilia by today’s standards.” In the case of Rosalynn Carter, to me the story is probably about the relationship between Rosalynn Carter and Jimmy Carter. It’s a little bit more like Johnny Cash. I don’t know. It just feels like on her own… By the way, in a weird way, on Jimmy Carter’s own, even though he was president, I’m not sure there would be enough there. But their relationship was fascinating, so long-lived and so beautiful and decent, and the way that they both just walked the walk. Also, the two of them defined a kind of Christianity that is what I would think of as actual Christianity. John: When you look at the Habitat for Humanity work that Carter was doing later on in his years, it’s literally building houses for people, just like, be a carpenter. Craig: Following the teachings of Jesus and giving and giving and giving. You’d like to think that, in part, that’s why they both made it so far in life. They were fulfilled with each other and by life and their good works, which is in stark contrast to some of the people that we now deal with, these social media-baiting idiots. It’s almost like a different species of person. The sadness of her death to me was more in the context of end of an era. John: I worry about lack of conflict. I don’t know where the source of the conflict is. The conflict doesn’t feel like it’s between the two of them. Who is the antagonist here, and how is she growing and changing? I don’t have a sense of that yet. Any movie is going to need to figure out what that is, because right now, it’s almost Hallmarky in the sense it’s just smooth sailing. Craig: One of the things that drama struggles with is to portray decency, steady, reliable decency, because it’s not interesting. We simply aren’t entertained by it. Neither one of them seemed interested in interesting anyone. They just wanted to do good things. I do think a Rosalynn Carter biopic would be a challenge. Jimmy Carter, you know that he was involved in this insane nuclear accident? John: No, I don’t know anything about that. Craig: Not that he caused it, but he was a nuclear engineer. He worked on nuclear submarines. There was an accident at a reactor. Jimmy Carter and his team was sent in to clean it up, and they did. It was Chernobyl-ish in the fact that they were exposed to quite a bit of radiation and all the rest of it. He was an heroic guy, and I think more than any other president, has received a little bit of historical rehabilitation, at least any other from my lifetime. John: Going back to the whole issues of conflict and where is the conflict in this story, I am aware that we on Scriptnotes are always talking about the hero’s journey, the sense of, oh, this is the character who grows up in a place, leaves the place, is transformed, goes through these trials. That’s not the only way stories can work mythologically. There’s things called the heroine’s journey and other alternative ways of thinking about what a central character’s journey might be. We’re trying to put together an episode talking through these alternate ways of thinking about that. Craig: Listen. Anything that interests people, I think, is the goal. It doesn’t have to be from one perspective or another. What’s fascinating to me is that, as varied as world cultures are, storytelling and mythologizing are incredibly similar. The Hero’s Journey ultimately really was just saying that. The word hero was applied to all genders. It is kind of incredible. It makes me wonder if this way we think about storytelling, it’s just imprinted in the brain. It’s not necessarily cultural. The brain has a way of organizing drama. But that said, I’m open to anything. If it makes people sit forward and engages them, yes. John: I think some of the overlooked stories in mythology would be Demeter’s story, or the kidnapped woman who has to adapt and survive in a place, Medea as a woman who is not a classic protagonist story, yet is a part of foundational. Craig: Great story there. John: It’s a great story though. Craig: Those kids die. John: They do. Craig: She’s angry. John: She’s very angry. Craig: Oh, man, does she get angry. John: You know who else is angry? Craig: Who? John: George Santos. Craig: The Pope, George Santos? John: Pope George Santos. For folks who are listening to this years after we recorded it and are going, “Who is George Santos?” Craig: “Who is George Santos?” George Santos, I believe he was the Pope. He was a Jewish, not-Jewish, astronaut, physicist, professor. I think he was the president and also none of those, just a liar. John: George Anthony Devolder Santos we believe is his full name. Craig: Maybe. John: Spent his early life in Jackson Heights and also in Brazil. He was elected as a US Representative from New York City as a Republican, openly gay. Everything that basically he ended up saying turned out to be a lie. Craig: Lie. John: This was all revealed after he was elected. The New York Times reported how much of his life was misrepresented. There was really a sense of failure of journalism to have not investigated any of this stuff earlier on. He was the sixth person ever kicked out of Congress. Craig: Congress is enormous. 535, I think, people. Over the course of 200 and whatever many years, he’s number six. He not only was a serial fabulist, who for instance eventually would say, “I’m Jew-ish.” He also was a fraud. He was misusing campaign funds to buy fabulous things. We’re talking about him like he’s dead. He’s still alive. He is fascinating. John: Yes. I think he’s a great character. Craig: He is. I love listening to him, because it’s like somebody coming out and saying, “And now, the dumpster fire show.” It’s weirdly funny. John: It’s funny because you recognize he actually has no power. With Trump, it’s terrifying, because like, oh shit, people are actually going to vote for him. Everyone recognizes this is absurd. Craig: It is a remarkable clown show. You’re right. He does feel vaguely innocuous. He did misuse campaign funds, and that’s a crime. John: That’s a crime. He’s indicted. He will probably go to jail. Craig: He will go to prison, as well he should. I hope he does. But he’s also kind of ridiculous. Even when Saturday Night Live would make fun of him, it seemed like they were enjoying it. John: Absolutely. Bowen Yang’s portrayal of him was delightful and funny. You’d worry, oh, it’s softening him too much, but not really. It’s not like the thing you worry about with Trump, where you’re making him likable. You’re not making him likable, because he’s absurd. Craig: He’s absurd and he was ejected from a Republican-controlled Congress, and he was a Republican. He is now starting to accuse other people of things. He’s like, “Okay. If you kick me out, I’m going to say that one’s gay and that one did this and that one beat his wife.” There’s a great exchange where he accused a guy of beating his wife. The problem with George Santos is he’s like the kid who cried wolf times a thousand. Who knows what anything coming out of his mouth- John: You can’t believe anything, I think- Craig: Nothing. John: … which is part of the fun. Looking for comps with this, Shattered Glass, in terms of a fabulist, is just watching it all come crashing down. What’s so weird though is, in the movie Shattered Glass – Billy Ray wrote and directed that – it’s over the course of one day, it just all comes crashing down. Here, the story comes out, but it just keeps going and going and going. Craig: It just keeps going. John: It reminded me a little more of Tiger King, where it’s just like, you’re an absurd character here, and somehow the world has to go around. Craig: Great comp. That’s a great comp. That’s why a documentary that would follow, if it had followed George Santos around- John: Oh, god. Craig: … and picked up his reaction and his bizarre lies and then showing how he was lying with a simple edit from what he says to what is real would’ve been amazing. Shattered Glass, Billy portrays Stephen Glass as a tragic figure who wants applause and love and can’t get it. Peter Sarsgaard does such a beautiful job of playing somebody who beats himself up for getting suckered. Everybody knows. There’s no conflict. Everybody knows. He knows. He knows he’s lying when he’s lying. He’s basically saying, “I’m lying.” There’s a great clip from Fox News where someone asks him something, and he gives an answer, and she goes, “You just can’t tell the truth.” That is literally on Fox News. No one ever believed anything he said, and then that’s it. Then he got kicked out. John: There is a movie in development. Craig: You’re kidding me. John: Oh, no. Craig: Oh, come on. John: It’s HBO. It could be really fun. Craig: It’s on HBO? Who’s doing it? John: It’s written by Mike Makowsky, who came on Scriptnotes. He’s the guy who did- Craig: Oh, I remember. John: … Bad Education. Craig: He’s a good writer. John: Good writer. Episode 448, he was on for that. Here’s the write-up that we have so far. “The film tells the story of a seemingly minor local race that wound up a battle for the soul of Long Island and unexpectedly carved the path to the world’s most famous and now disgraced Congressman. It follows the Gatsby-esque journey of a man from nowhere who exploited the system, waged war on the truth, and swindled one of the wealthiest districts in the country to achieve his American dream.” Craig: I wish Mike all the luck. I don’t know how I would do… I also don’t know how to do a lot of things. Then I see them and I’m like, “Oh, that’s how you do it.” John: It feels like the HBO movie is the right way to go. It’s Frank Rich who- Craig: It’s a movie? John: Yeah, a movie. Craig: Great. John: It looks like it’s a movie. Craig: You said Frank Rich? John: Frank Rich. Veep and- Craig: Now I’m in. John: … Succession. Craig: No offense to Mike. He’s a really good writer. But Frank Rich just simply to me, he doesn’t just signify quality, he creates quality. I can’t imagine that anything involving Frank Rich will be anything less than excellent. John: Now you’re excited. Craig: Now I’m sitting full- John: Now you’re on board. Craig: I’m going to watch this. John: The last one is Sam Altman and OpenAI. The short version of this, we’re recording this the 3rd of December, 2023. Who knows what the next- Craig: Week or two will bring. John: New stuff always happens. Essentially, Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, which is one of the big AI companies as of 2023. His rise to this position, at 19 he founded Loopt, which is a location-based social networking mobile application, raised $30 million in venture capital, ultimately sold it for $43 million. Was president of Y Combinator, the big venture startup, and then OpenAI, which was founded by him, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services, other folks in there. Craig: Veritable rogues gallery. John: Absolutely. You’ve got some really fascinating personalities in there. Then of course, the big thing that happened recently for us was that OpenAI’s board, which is a nonprofit, which is really confusing, voted to oust him. His employees rose up and said, “No, you can’t get rid of him,” and so he came back in. Craig: Now, in the traditional version of this story, what happens is the evil board decides to push AI into dangerous territory to make more money, and the courageous CEO, backed by his faithful workers, rebel. It is the opposite of what has happened here. What appears to have happened is the board was worried that things were getting pushed too far, and Sam was like, “No.” John: We don’t honestly know. One of the things that’s so fascinating about this moment we’re in right now is that we don’t know they actually fired him, because they’ve been so, so vague. Craig: I guess maybe I’m saying a rumor. John: You’re saying a rumor. It’s been so, so vague. The best explanation I’ve heard most recently is the board realized they couldn’t control him. It wasn’t about a worry of a specific thing. They just figured out, “Oh, we have three votes. We could oust him.” They just did it without thinking through stuff. I think my question is, when a version of this story is told, which I think probably will be told, again, where are the edges of this? Do you just really focus on those few days and all of the drama around it? It’s a really tight thing, like Margin Call, which is really a tight, little story, or do you go bigger and broader? Because we’re still in the middle of it, we don’t know what is actually going to happen with OpenAI. I think that’s probably a mistake. I think you do need to put some edges on it. Craig: We should ask ChatGPT what it thinks. John: Absolutely. Craig: I feel like it’s a sequence in a movie. I don’t think in and of itself, a board ousting somebody and then putting them back in feels… I wouldn’t tune in. John: It feels like part of an episode of Succession. It doesn’t feel like enough of a story in itself. Craig: In fact, it’s part of seven episodes of Succession. John: It’s happened a few times on Succession. Craig: Just a few. The board voting and getting rid of somebody and not getting rid of somebody, we’ve definitely seen that. It does work as a dramatic device in fiction. In reality, in some of the Apple movies, they’ve said, “Okay, we’re going to get rid of Steve Jobs. Oh, we’re going to put Steve Jobs back in.” But it’s never the focus of the movie. John: The other comps obviously are Social Network, Blackberry, which I really enjoyed. Craig: I want to see Blackberry. I haven’t seen it. John: Blackberry’s fun. It’s like, “Oh wow, we’ve built this amazing thing.” Then the iPhone comes out, and everything comes crashing down in ways that are delightful. Craig: Yeah, and they’re Canadian. John: They’re Canadian. It’s a thoroughly Canadian movie. Craig: So Canadian. I love that. John: It’s so good. The appealing thing about trying to do this movie is it gives you a chance to also include a bunch of other famous people. Peter Thiel and Elon, Satya Nadella. There’s lots of people you can stick in there. Craig: So many people that will sue you. John: Let’s talk about that. Craig: Thiel’s going to sue you, for sure. John: Thiel, he’s already sued- Craig: He may sue us for even talking about him. John: Absolutely. We have no criticism of Peter Thiel on this podcast. Craig: Oh, god. John: But I will say, let’s talk about who can sue you of the people we’ve talked about’s things. The nice thing about the dead people is they can’t sue you. Craig: Dead people can’t sue you. John: Santos is going to have a hard time suing you. Craig: Santos, he could try, but he doesn’t have the money anymore, and he’s going to go to prison probably. Peter Thiel and Elon Musk can sue you in the blink of an eye, and in doing so, wreck you if you fight back, because obviously, they have essentially unlimited resources. That’s terrifying. It is one of the reasons why we need an independent, free, and thriving press in this country, because the press really is protected in ways that individuals aren’t. I’m sure that any company making something like this would be a little concerned. Elon and Peter certainly have been litigious before. John: Of the biopics we talked through today, which ones do we think are going to actually happen? You were pretty thumbs up on Sandra Day O’Connor. Craig: Yes. I think that Sandra Day O’Connor feels like it could be a decent movie. John: Henry Kissinger? Craig: Definitely. John: 100%. Multiple versions of it probably. Craig: Yes. That’d be a good HBO mini series, I would imagine. Limited series, I should say. John: Rosalynn Carter? Craig: I don’t think so. John: I don’t think so either. I think you’d have to find a very specific way into it. George Santos is actually already happening. Craig: It’s happening. John: It’s happening. Craig: Frank Rich. John: Frank Rich. Craig: Mike Makowsky. John: Sam Altman, I don’t think yet. Craig: No. John: People are trying to do it. I know there’s people milling around. Craig: He’s also just now emerged as a name people know because of this. Prior to that, he wasn’t TV famous. John: He’s also young. There’s a lot of runway ahead for him. Craig: Absolutely. I assume that he, like all of the Silicon people, uses a blood boy to refresh his blood. John: A thing I didn’t talk about is, in addition to OpenAI, he has that service that’s scanning people’s eyeballs for identity and cryptocurrency. Craig: Fantastic. John: That’s good stuff. Craig: Can’t wait to- John: Can’t wait for that. Craig: … see what’s coming on the horizon. John: Nothing ominous about that. Craig: Nope. Going to hide in my house. John: It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is the International Phonetic Alphabet, which I’m now learning, because I’ve never learned it. The IPA is a way of describing all the sounds in human languages. It’s a very distinct system for how you write that down. I’ve always seen it, and I’ve never been able to interpret it or understand it. I’m writing my flashcards, and I’m just learning how to do it. Craig: Love that. John: It is really clever and cool. You recognize the similarities and differences between languages and between dialects and accents, because the same word in English, based on different accents, would have very different written versions in IPA. Craig: Notations. John: Notations in IPA. Craig: I just did a puzzle recently where part of the deal was you had to use one of the IPA diacritics, a single dot, two dots, or a line, to change the pronunciation of a word- John: Oh, neat. Craig: … in the clue to be able to solve the answer. Then later, when you looked at all of those things, the dots and the dashes form Morse code letters. John: Love it. Craig: It was fun to sit with the IPA notation there and do that. It’s very cool for nerds. John: For nerds. For nerds. Craig: For uncool people like us. John: But also, those are homonyms. What’s one- Craig: Homophone? John: When a word has two different pronunciations, but it’s written the same way, that’s a homonym? Craig: That is a homonym, right. John: Homonym. Craig: Homophones are the ones that sound the same but mean different things. John: Present versus present. They track those differently. It’s not just where the emphasis is. Literally, the vowel sounds have changed. Craig: Yes, exactly. I’m with you. I support your One Cool Thing. I think it is cool. John: Every January 1st, I try to have an area of interest for the new year. Craig: That’s very John August of you. John: IPA is going to be my area of interest. Craig: I did a variety writers thing a few days ago, and Nathan Fielder was one of the other writers on the panel. He listens to our show. John: As does Bowen Yang, who played George Santos. Craig: Bowen listens to our show? John: Yeah. Craig: He’s a genius. I’m obsessed all the way back to his lip syncing videos. You’ve seen those, right? John: Oh, 100%. Craig: They’re amazing. John: That’s where I first became aware of him. Craig: He’s amazing. Okay, so Bowen, hi. Come on our show. You’re awesome. Nathan wanted me to pass along hello to you. He also said, in his Nathan, he’s like, “I feel like John August is a very organized guy.” Then he said, “I don’t mean to say that you’re not organized. I just feel like, you know.” I was like, “No, you nailed it. He’s a very organized guy.” You’ve organized your new topic for 2024. John: Yeah. I’m prepared. Craig: Well done. My One Cool Thing is a trailer for a television series that just came out, I believe two days ago, as of this recording. It is for the show Fallout. John: I’m excited to see Fallout. Our friends have made that show. Craig: Fallout is executive produced by Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy, who have been on our show before. Jonah, I believe, directed the first couple of episodes. I don’t think they’re the showrunners. I just know them. I’m so sorry to the showrunners. We’ll get you in the show notes, I promise. After The Last of Us, there seemed to be this, I don’t know, epidemic of sudden development of video games into shows and movies and things. I suspect quite a few of them are not going to work very well. What I loved about the trailer for Fallout was the vibe, which I think is different than tone. Tone is sort of like, what kind of comedy, what kind of drama, is it melodramatic, is it realistic. Vibe is this other stuff. It’s just like, did you capture the soul of something. As a Fallout fan, I watch that trailer, and I’m like, “Yeah, they got the vibe.” Now, I can’t say anything yet about the story they’re telling. They have to create a central character, because when you play, it’s just you. You don’t have a name, and you don’t talk. We’ll see how that works. The vibe, that retro futuristic thing, and how they smartly knew to say, “Okay, the power suits have to look exactly like that, but the ghouls don’t have to look like the ghouls in the game. We want to maintain Walter Goggins’s face so that he can act.” These are the decisions you have to make when you’re adapting video games. So far, from what I’ve seen, looking awesome. John: That’s great. Craig: That’s on Amazon. John: Feels like Amazon. We’re guessing. It’s on a streamer. Craig: Amazon? It’s Fallout. Whatever. It’s Fallout. John: I’m excited to see it. Craig: Yeah, very much so. John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Craig: That’s right. John: Our outro this week comes from James Llonch. It features Craig Mazin ranting about his least favorite screenwriting app. Craig: Which one? Oh, yes, that one. John: That one. If you have an outro, you could send us a link to [email protected]. We always love to hear your outros. That’s also the place where you can send questions and follow-up. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. They ship in time for Christmas, so get those. Craig: Great Christmas gift- John: Great Christmas gift. Craig: … for the dork in your family. John: Also, Christmas gift, Arlo Finches are still out there for the kids out there. Craig: I don’t know if Finches is… I want to make it different. I want to give you a different pluralization. John: Arlos Finch? Craig: Arlo Finchae. John: Finchae? Craig: I like Arlo Finchae. John: All right. They’re good. You can get them signed. There’s a link in the show notes for those. Writer Emergency Pack, they sell really big on Amazon. Craig- Craig: Great. John: It’s weird making a seasonal product, because literally, our chart is just like a straight line up. It’s like a hockey stick. It’s a gift. People give it. Craig: I don’t think people who don’t sell things understand what Christmas is really about. John: It is crazy. Craig: Christmas is an economic phenomenon. John: 80% of the money we make on Writer Emergency Pack is holidays. Craig: You are hardly the only business that does. John: You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net. Also, a good gift, you could get somebody a Scriptnotes gift. At scriptnotes.net, you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on which event in history had the most negative impact on civilization. Craig: Heavy. John: Thanks, Craig. Craig: Thank you, John. [Bonus Segment] John: This Bonus Segment topic I’m stealing from Electoral Vote, which is a website I read every day about what’s happening in US government. It’s a good site for that. Their question was, which single event at any time in history has had the biggest negative impact on civilization? They had good suggestions from their own listeners, but I wanted to hear from you, what you were thinking about. We also have to discuss, what is a single event? Is this a thing that happens in the course of a day, or can it be over a couple years? Is World War I an event? Craig: Yes. John: Yeah, sure. Craig: Sure. You could, if you wanted to, just squish it down to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, which kicked it off. John: Yeah, but there would still probably have been a World War I. It was going to happen. Craig: It was a pile of gasoline-soaked rags. John: I’m saying the African slave trade is not an event. That to me is too broad of a thing. Craig: It is not an event. We’re looking for an event. That’s a tough one. It also eliminates things like disease, which has had a greater impact on us than anything. John: The Black Death. Craig: Bubonic plague, smallpox, all of these things. The adoption of Christianity by the Romans and the transformation of this- John: Theodosius, I think, was the- Craig: It was Constantine. I believe it was Constantine. John: The Romans, they were taking this, what essentially was a kind of obscure cult, and making it the state religion. Craig: Just made it the state. I thought it was Constantine, but I could be wrong. Either way, whoever did it suddenly turned this cult of sacrificial, the worship of the poor, and made it imperial. The Holy Roman Empire then spread and essentially took over all of Europe and went to war with the Ottoman Empire, and also imparted what the Americans called manifest destiny, a religious aspect to the concept of domination, dominating other cultures because they were not appropriately religious. The Holy Wars were incredibly costly. Then the sectarianism, where the church had a schism, and that created wars, all the way through to what was happening in Ireland. That, I think, as an event, it’s… Listen. There’s another way of looking at it, which is if the Romans hadn’t done that, and they spread the Roman mythology across, that it still turns out terrible. John: There’s plenty of alt histories, which is basically like, what if they hadn’t done that? We’re living under a more standard Roman mythology of stuff. That would be weird as well. Craig: We worship Jupiter. John: Exactly. Along the thread of conquering the world, you also have Genghis Khan and say his birth or his rise out of that place. You look at the transformation of Asia and the fact that some astonishing number of percentage of people have Genghis Khan’s DNA because of what happened there. Craig: You could point to Mao’s Great Leap Forward. In terms of hard-to-comprehend numbers of deaths, maybe 20 million people. Numbers that we really can’t get our arms around. John: Columbus visiting America. Would Europeans have gotten to America at some other point? Yes. Craig: Yes. John: But Columbus’s arrival and then subsequent voyages and having the Crown behind him and the resources to really annihilate indigenous peoples. Craig: Annihilate them largely through disease, although I would still trace that back to the notion of we must spread Christian values to the world of nonbelievers and pagans. John: I don’t have a good sense, honestly, of when the missionaries actually became part of it, because I perceive it as being a gold rush at the start. Craig: Yeah, the missionaries were right there. The conquistadors. Everybody went under the banner of Christ. Everybody was there to spread the word. Justin Marks, we’ve had Justin on the show. John: I think so. He was on the show. Craig: Yeah. He’s got Shogun coming out, which also looks fantastic. I love Shogun, by the way. One of my favorite novels. The Jesuits were there in Japan in the 1800s. They go everywhere. The missionaries find themselves all over the world. That was the tip of the spear of colonialism and the slave trade and all sorts of terrible things. Oh, man, one event. John: The burning of the Library at Alexandria. Craig: Brutal. John: Brutal, brutal loss. It’s a little unclear how much those were the only copies of those documents and how much other stuff could be found. Craig: Why didn’t they back it up in the Cloud? John: Come on. Cloud storage, man. Craig: Guys, it’s Cloud storage. It’s free. John: Absolutely. Dropbox. Craig: Wouldn’t it have been cool to go back and say, “You guys can back this up in the Cloud.” They just look up. John: Let’s talk about inventions. The steam engine, obviously, as an instrument of war. A lot of these things, you could see there’s the pro and the con. The printing press allowed for misinformation and the Bible, but it also allowed for literacy and development of culture. Craig: One of the great events that transformed the world, I think again, probably for good and for bad in equal measures, was industrialization, the concept of the assembly line. In the Revolutionary War, Americans kind of invented assembly lines to create arms, to create armaments. It was one of the reasons we won. You could certainly point to gunpowder as being a huge problem. John: Or the first mass-produced revolver was 1836. That’s a huge change. Before then, you’re making a gun one at a time. Craig: Exactly, and you’re firing one shot at a time and loading in your things. Yes, all absolutely true. Then there’s the open question of nuclear weapons. John: Is Hiroshima the event? Craig: There are people who argue that Hiroshima prevented the invasion of Japan and even more Japanese deaths and more American deaths. There are people who argue that Hiroshima prevented the Soviet invasion of Japan, and then the Stalinist oppression of that country. Then of course, there are people who say, “Sorry, you just murdered tens and tens and thousands and thousands of innocent people who had nothing to do with this war. They were just civilians.” But also, notable, we haven’t had a world war since the invention of nuclear weapons, because it seems untenable. John: Maybe some future topic we’ll talk about the good things, the single best things that have happened, because I can think of a couple off the top of my head. The contraceptive pill changed society for the best. Craig: Absolutely. John: Just the ability for women to head to the workforce and have control over their fertility. Craig: Vaccination. John: Vaccination. Craig: Vaccination on its own is a miracle. A miracle. So of course, idiots have to blame it for things. It’s unbelievable. John: It’s the worst. Thank you, Craig. Craig: Thank you, John. Links: Sandra Day O’Connor Henry Kissinger Rosalynn Carter George Santos Sam Altman What happened at OpenAI? The Sam Altman saga, explained by Rachel Lehman for The Washington Post International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) Fallout – Trailer Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt! Check out the Inneresting Newsletter Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription! Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter John on Mastodon Outro by James Llonch (send us yours!) Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Email us at [email protected] You can download the episode here.The post Scriptnotes, Episode 621: How Would This Be a Biopic?, Transcript first appeared on John August.

The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 566 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we have the incredible Ashley Nicole Black filling in for Craig. She’s a writer, an actor, a producer, a dog mom. She’s everything you could hope to ever be. Welcome back, Ashley. Ashley Nicole Black: Hello. I will try to fill in Craig’s shoes and talk about Chernobyl or something. John: Yeah, and puzzles. Mention puzzles a lot. I think I emailed you about your incredible hosting of the WGA Awards a while back. I think it’s fantastic that you show up to this podcast still wearing that incredible dress. Just last night you were hosting on the Creative Arts Emmys. You were one of the presenters. Talk to us about that. Ashley: Sam Richardson and I presented the awards to the makeup artists, one of my favorite parts of production, so I was very happy to do that. It was really fun. They make it really easy and fun, actually. John: Now something like this, we were talking that there’s a New York version and an LA version, and we’re going to cut it all together. What was the process like being in there for this? How long did the Emmys take for you? Ashley: I was actually surprised, and I don’t know why I was, because obviously, they do this every year, and it’s a very professional production. They have it so perfectly foolproof. Someone walks you exactly where you’re going to go. They point you exactly where to stand. There’s just no way to mess it up, which is really nice. John: That’s great. Since you’re a guest on this podcast, I want to make it just as straightforward and simple, so I pitched some really light and breezy topics for you. I think we’ll talk about abortion, cultural appropriation, fan culture and critics, so just no sweat. This will be an easy, easy, breezy podcast for you. Ashley: At least I don’t have to wear heels. John: That’s the whole bonus. We’ll also ask you some TV questions, because you are the person who knows about television. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, let’s throw a party. I want to talk to you about entertaining at home in 2022. Ashley: That’s my actual area of expertise, so this is going to be good. John: I’m looking forward to it. Reminder to everybody that we have a live show coming up here in Los Angeles. We already emailed out to our Premium subscribers about first dibs on tickets. As we record this, I don’t know if there are any tickets left for the live show, but there will be a livestream. If you’re a person outside of Los Angeles or a person who didn’t get tickets and want to watch the livestream of the show, you can follow the link in the show notes to that. We’re so excited to have an audience, to be back in a theater telling jokes and hopefully learning about screenwriting. Please come to our live show, or at least virtually come to our live show when we throw that. Other news, WGA West elections. Every year we elect new people to the WGA board. I know some of the incumbents. There’s also really good newcomers. We’re not going to do a normal Scriptnotes where we talk through all the candidates and who’s great and who’s not so great. They’re all kind of good, so I would just say read through the statements, pick people that you really like. Ashley, have you already voted? Ashley: No, I’m not a member of WGA West. I’m a WGA East. I haven’t voted yet, because I feel like I don’t know a ton about the candidates, so I’m still figuring that out. I know which issues are important, but then you have to see which candidates agree with you. Still figuring it out. John: Still figuring it out. As I look through the possibilities, I’m always just trying to make sure that I get diverse representation of different kinds of writer careers, because in our guild, we have screenwriters, we have television writers on series, we have comedy variety writers. We have a whole range of people. I want to make sure we have at least somebody in that room who knows all this background, so I’m trying to pick my candidates based on that. I always encourage people to look through the candidates’ statements, which are really good this year. Everyone do fill out your ballot and vote for your WGA West or your WGA East elections. We’ve stalled long enough, Ashley. Got to get to something challenging here. Let’s talk about abortion. A group called Showrunners for Abortion Rights had a letter that went out that was asking the studios to clarify their policies on what they’re going to do to protect their crews and staff in states where abortion access is going to be increasingly restricted. I know this was a subject that was near and dear to your heart on one of our previous Scriptnotes. Your One Cool Thing was an abortion fund. This is something you’ve been thinking about since before this decision came down. Ashley: Yeah, and it’s an interesting time that we’re in, because obviously, abortion has been a legal issue for so long, and now it’s, for us at least in entertainment, but I think for a lot of people, transitioned to be a workplace safety issue. I think that that’s the transformation that people are slowing wrapping their heads around, including our employers, that now you’re in a situation where if you’re sending employees to work in a different state, they have different access to health care based on where they’re working, and also different access to human rights, which is not a typical situation for a boss or an employer to be dealing with. We’re in an uncharted time right now. John: Absolutely. As we talked about on the show before, Craig said maybe we shouldn’t be filming in states that have these abortion restrictions. I wanted to offer a point/counterpoint, two of our listeners who wrote in with emails talking about the two sides of that issue. Megana, if you can talk us through these two emails. Megana Rao: Alex wrote in and said, “In Episode 561, Craig made a plea to stop working in states in which there are abortion bans and called out Georgia specifically. This isn’t the first time Georgia has faced boycotts, but I implore you to reconsider your public support for a boycott of the Georgia entertainment industry. I’m a Georgia-based writer and actor and a supporter of women’s rights and abortion access. This state and the entertainment industry here is full of women who are fighting on the front lines to keep abortion safe and available for women, especially those who are most vulnerable. I fail to see how a boycott of the Georgia entertainment industry would do anything but starve these brave women of resources and support to continue their fight. I believe your plea should be the opposite of a boycott, to instead flood the state with people and funding to help it flip fully blue and become a safe haven for women seeking abortions.” John: This perspective on a boycott of Georgia is talking about the harm that was going to happen to the women who would otherwise be employed in the state in productions and such. It really is a thing to consider. We have moved so much film and TV production to Georgia that if you suddenly pull that out, what are the people who are trying to make their living there supposed to do? Ashley, what’s your feedback? Ashley: And some people who moved there because Hollywood put so much production there. It’s like it really is you’re playing with people’s bottom lines there. It’s really tough. I don’t know the answer. I don’t know that there is one right answer. The one right answer is to have universal human rights in every state in the country. That’s not something Hollywood can make happen on our own. It is really tough, because I do understand this person’s point that you’re saying in support of women’s rights, you’re abandoning the women in Georgia, but also at the same time, if you don’t do that, you’re asking women from other states to go to Georgia and be in a dangerous situation. There is no right answer, unfortunately. John: Let’s listen to Erica’s perspective on this. Megana: Erica says, “I wanted to add a point that a showrunner friend made to me. We’re not just discussing access to abortion here. I worked well into my pregnancies. If I’d been working on a set in one of those states and an emergent situation developed, like preeclampsia, ruptured placenta, the chances that I would receive the best possible care are severely diminished. Doctors in these states will not and cannot legally provide an abortion until a woman is actively dying, not even if the fetus is not viable. If there’s a heartbeat, the mother has to be actually dying, and then it may be too late, or she may have complications related to not being treated properly and quickly. Our childbearing colleagues are taking a risk when they take a job in these states. I don’t think any of us should have to turn down work we love and want to do because we’re afraid we may not get proper health care. I’m with you guys. We should pull out of states that fail to provide health care for women. I don’t think women should be calculating their life risk versus career benefit when taking a job as a writer, director, actor, or crew member.” John: This is a lot of really good points on the other side here. Erica’s talking about if you are a person who could potentially get pregnant, you may decide not to even take that job because it’s in a state where you don’t feel safe working. That is not good for this individual person, but also for the industry. You’re not going to be able to get the people you want to get working on that production because they don’t feel safe there. Ashley: They’re also making the point that the issue goes beyond abortion. It’s health care. There have even been stories in these states of people not being able to get their arthritis medication, because technically the arthritis medication could be used to cause an abortion or whatever. It’s not just women. It’s not just people who may need abortions. It’s really everyone is just going to have a lower standard of health care in this state. Some people may opt out of even taking those jobs. The people who would have to opt out are people who are already grossly underrepresented in our industry. John: My suspicion is that we’re going to find coming out of this is a lot of showrunners and other people who have the authority to decide where they’re going to shoot. They may not publicly say that they’re avoiding Georgia or they’re avoiding Texas or a certain state for a reason, but they may just quietly not go there. I’ll be curious to see whether a year from now the number of productions is down or things have changed, not because people have actually made a statement saying this is the reason we’re not going there. It’s just because it’s just easier to not go to one of those states, which is sort of a soft boycott. It’s a boycott in all but name. Ashley: I think that’s true. I think that’ll be true also outside of the work that we do. I can see college students. As a parent, do you want to send your student to a state where you know they won’t be able to get health care if they end up needing it? I think there’s going to be a soft divestment across the board. Politically it’s really scary for the states to become even more siloed from each other when people are not taking jobs and going to college in different states and moving around and becoming even more separate. It’s not a great path to go down, but I think it’s where we’ll be going. John: When we had Liz Hannah on the show most recently, she was talking about the show she was filming. She was in I think Georgia for… It could’ve been North Carolina. She was outside of Los Angeles for a long time, and she became pregnant while she was there and was not revealing that she was pregnant. Her pregnancy was a big factor in this production that she was doing. It was nothing she could’ve anticipated. I just wonder whether a lot of people are going to be going into productions thinking, okay, maybe for something short, we can get in, get out, but for something that is 8 episodes, 10 episodes, it’s longer. Craig and I did go back and forth a lot about are we going to go to the Austin Film Festival, are we contributing to policies we don’t like by going to the Austin Film Festival. We decided it’s probably better for us to go and go loudly. Again, it’s short. We’re in and we’re out. We’re not assuming any risk to ourselves or to people who might want to come to it. It’s all complicated. It’s all a factor. Until there’s universal agreement on what those rights should be, it’s going to be tough to sort out. Ashley: It’s unfair that we as individuals are now all having to figure this out for ourselves. The whole point of democracy is that we have a government who makes safe choices for us as a group hopefully, and instead now we’re in this situation. John: Let’s bring it back to where we started, which is the showrunners who are coming to the studio saying, “You need to tell us what your policies are going to be,” which is probably the middle ground here, which basically if you are going to have productions in these places, how are we going to make sure that not just writers but directors and actors and crew are going to be able to have their health care needs met if they’re in one of these states where abortion is prohibited, where there are going to be policies there that are going to be interfering with people’s ability to get the care they need. To date, we haven’t gotten great answers back from a lot of the studios. That’s what the next round of pushing is, is trying to make sure there’s consistent policies for studios that’s not just ad hoc one production at a time. Ashley: I think the studios maybe would’ve preferred not to take this on, but it’s like, unfortunately, this is what it is. If you’re asking people to travel for work, these are things that you have to think about. There’s also a lot of tricky legal issues in it for them. If some states are making it illegal to help someone obtain an abortion, if the studio does help you travel or whatever, then they’re legally liable. It is a very tricky issue. It will take time for them to figure it out, regardless of what their excitement level is to do it. John: For sure. We have explored that topic. We got through it. Take a breath. Let’s do something much easier here. We have two questions about photos. Megana, can you help us out? Megana: Michelle asks, “Months ago you all mentioned putting a link to a song within a script. I feel like Megana was the one who mentioned it, and I can’t find it in the show transcripts, but it’s driving me crazy. Is it appropriate to put a link to a song or a specific image in a pdf script? If so, how would one do that?” John: We found it. It was Episode 533 where we talked about putting links into songs and to images. Ashley, do you ever do this? In any of your scripts, have you put in a link to a song or something you want people to click through to see? Ashley: No. John: How would you feel about that if that were in a script you read? Ashley: I’m curious what your answer is, because you’re much more experienced than I am. I would feel like the script was written by a young person. If I was reading a script, and it had a link in it, I’d be like, “Oh, this person’s young.” I think for songs, I usually just put the title and the artist of the song, and the person can stop and look it up if they want. For an image, I would probably just describe the image and probably what it makes the character feel like to look at it. I’ve never thought about putting a link in a script. John: What I hear you saying there is you don’t want to stop the read, saying you’ve got to stop everything you’re doing and click through to hear, because they may never come back to the script. It’s also the script’s job to convey what the thing is. That said, I’ve started putting links in scripts to certain things when it was important, when I needed to get a very specific reference on something so people could see what something was. For a musical, I have put in links to this is what the song sounds like, so you can actually play the song while you’re reading through the lyrics. I have done that. In Highland, it’s easy to do. Links just work in the new Highland. I tried it in Fade In, just to make sure it would work. If it works in Fade In, it probably works in Final Draft. It’s a thing you can do, but not everyone’s going to love it. Just be aware that it’s a choice you’re making. Megana, when you were doing it, it was for a pilot? Megana: Yeah, it was for a pilot that was also a musical, so I wanted the references to be in there. Ashley: I also wrote a pilot that was a musical. I wrote the lyrics in the script, and then the music was just sent along also, so they could click on and listen to it. When I did that, the producers were like, “Actually, don’t even put the lyrics in the script. Just describe the song and include the song in the email.” John: Lots of good choices there. It’s going to depend on what you’re doing and how you want to do it. I tend to put full lyrics in things, particularly if it’s specifically moving the story forward, like it’s doing dialog work. If it’s just a moment where it’s the song, and that’s the whole experience, then yeah, just summarizing it or conveying the feel for it is probably going to be more important than what every lyric was in there. Let’s continue with Brett’s question here. Megana: Brett from New York says, “In your recent VFX episode, you all discussed practical photos versus VFX replacements of photos in movies. Craig mentioned that printed Photoshopped photos always look really bad. This is something I’ve noticed as well, and it always manages to take me out of the movie. The weird thing is Photoshop can be really convincing, especially in the year 2022. My question is, when it comes to movies, why is Photoshop often so noticeably terrible?” John: Ashley, is this a thing you’ve seen? I feel like whenever I see the framed photo of here’s the family, it’s like, oh, that doesn’t feel quite right. Have you seen convincing versions of it? Ashley: I didn’t think of it this way, but Brett is right. When you see Photoshops on the internet, they look really real, and on TV they often don’t. I think he has something there. I think possibly it’s because they’re taking… Sometimes it’s like they’ve taken a photo of one actor on set and a photo of another actor from 10 years ago and are trying to put them together or they’re de-aging actors. If you’re trying to print that out in time to shoot it practically, that’s just really, really fast. It may not be enough time to do that practically, whereas if you put it in in post, you can have more time to get it looking good. John: If I remember right, in the episode, they were talking about how a lot of it is just time, because they’ll put the little green card inside the picture frame, knowing we’re going to put that in later on, because we’re not going to have time to get something that looks really good right now. I also wonder if it’s just whose responsibility it is, because it’s going to be art department. Unless it’s a physically held prop, it’s going to probably be the art department who’s going to be responsible for doing that. It’s not their expertise, so they’re going to go out to somebody to do it. They may just not have the best resource to go out and find that, because they’re busy doing a thousand other things or trying to get the furniture in the room, not necessarily the photo inside the frame. It may just be a matter of specialty there. Photoshops can be really good, really convincing. It’s just planning. There’s a lot to plan for with a production. Ashley: I feel like just a lot of times it’s a picture of these two actors when they were children or whatever. Just hire two kids and take a picture of them. I think you think it’s cheaper to do the Photoshop, but it doesn’t cost that much to take a picture of a kid. By the time you spend hours on that Photoshop, you might’ve spent more money on it anyway. John: You could take a photo of two kids, but you can also probably find a photo you can buy of two kids that looks realistic and believable, because as an audience, we want to believe that those are the actors. You’re pointing the camera at them. We’re going to believe that it’s them. That they are believably children is more important than that they are necessarily direct matches for who those two kids are. Ashley: That’s how I feel. John: Now we’re going to get to some questions that you are especially well suited to answer here. Megana, Andrew has questions about TV. Megana: Andrew wrote in and says, “I promise I’m not a total dum-dum, but I’ve somehow remained ignorant on a certain question, even after listening to 95% of the entire Scriptnotes catalog. What are the differences and similarities between the following TV jobs: showrunner, head writer, creator, and executive producer. In case there’s multiple executive producers in television, I’ll clarify that I’m referring to the one that gets called the EP. At one point in my life, I used these phrases interchangeably. Then I listened to John’s interview with Stephen Schiff in Episode 337, and now my understanding here is just one big shrug emoji. Further confusing things for me is that I don’t see all of these terms in TV credits or on IMDb. How do I know based on credits who the primary creative voice is behind a show?” John: Lots to go through here. Let’s take these terms one at a time and see if we can figure them out. Ashley Nicole Black, how do we know who the creator of a show is? Ashley: First of all, I have to say I love this question. I have literally gotten this question from friends who are in a writers’ room, being like, “Hey, so I’ve been here for two weeks. Who do you think my boss is?” I’m like, “Talk to me about the body language in the room. We can figure this out.” John: That’s great. Ashley: Andrew should not feel bad about not understanding this. It is genuinely very confusing. The creator is usually the person who originally came up with the idea for a show. That’s just a genius idea that sprung from their head or something based on their life or, and this is a little weird, but if the show’s based on a book or a movie, but they’re the ones who turned it into the TV show, they’re still called the creator, even though someone else originated that idea. John: It is a WGA credit. WGA determines created by as a credit. You’re going to have to have written something. You’re going to have to have written the thing that is the template for what the whole thing is. Craig got a created by credit on Chernobyl. Most of the sitcoms you’ve ever seen are going to have a created by credit. Does The Black Lady Sketch Show have a created by credit? Ashley: Yeah, Robin. John: Robin is the creator of that show. Megana and I were talking with a woman who had a show, and she was the creator, but she was not the showrunner, because she was a playwright, she was brand new at this. She created the show. She was the underlying vision of it all, but a different person was brought in to be the showrunner. She worked with this person, showrunner, to actually get the show up and going. Ashley: Also, depending on when that person comes in. If they come in during development, they may also be called a co-creator. If they come in after, then they may just be called the showrunner. John: Let’s talk about the word showrunner, because a showrunner is not a credit you’re going to see in IMDb. Showrunner is a term of art for the person who is responsible for the overall running of the show on a creative level. There’s still going to be producers who are drilling down to every little bit of the budget, who are going to be doing logistics, and other folks. Can you talk us through a showrunner like you were on Ted Lasso? What does a showrunner on a show like that do? Ashley: The showrunner on a scripted show is running the whole process. They’re running the writers’ room. They’re running set when you’re on set. They’re running post. They’re just the boss through the whole process. Where there might be other mini bosses at different parts of the process, they’re the ones who are over the whole thing. John: Now how about in comedy and variety? You were on Samantha Bee’s show or even other sketch shows. What’s a showrunner like there? Ashley: There, the job of showrunner can be split into two jobs of showrunner and head writer. The head writer is running the writers’ room and overseeing all of the departments in terms of getting what was written realized. You may also have a showrunner who is a separate person, or the showrunner and head writer can be the same person. John: I think Saturday Night Live, I think Colin Jost is the head writer. Tina Fey was the head writer for a time. In script TV we think of them as being the showrunner, but Lorne Michaels is probably really the showrunner, is probably the person who’s most responsible for getting the show up every week. Head writer is also a term though, confusingly, we’ve seen with some of the Marvel projects. The writer we’d normally think of as being the showrunner doesn’t have that title, so they’re listed as head writer. There’s either, quote unquote, “no showrunner,” or the director also has some of the showrunning capabilities, and so the head writer is the person responsible for delivering the scripts, but is not necessarily the person responsible for delivering the finished cut to the studio. Ashley: Another term that’s not on here is the number two, which when my friend was like, “Who do I tell that I need a day off?” I’m like, “Who’s the showrunner? Who’s the number two?” Sometimes the number two is the person who’s doing the day-to-day running of the room or of set. They’re the person who you would talk to about personnel issues and stuff like that. Maybe the showrunner is just doing the higher order of creative things, or maybe not. It differs based on how every different showrunner runs their show. John: If you’re a writer on one of these projects, you’re going to have to figure this out, because if you’re on a Shondaland show, maybe she’s directly involved in all the stuff that’s going on, but maybe she’s not, because it’s on its 17th season and there’s a different person who’s responsible for that stuff. You will have to figure it out. There’s no great way looking at the credits to know who that person is at any given point. You just have to ask and figure out who the person is responsible for what kinds of things, who’s the person who’s looking at every cut. On a Greg Berlanti show, in the Greg Berlanti universe, there are shows he’s probably very directly involved, and there are shows where he’s not really directly involved. Instead, he is an executive producer. Now we need to talk about executive producer and how it’s a meaningful and a meaningless title, because there’s so many executive producers listed on any given show. Ashley: There are so many different kinds. Any show that I’ve worked on, there’s executive producers who you work with every single day, and then there’s people who the first time you ever see their names is in the credits when the show rolls. John: I was a huge fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and you see Sandy Gallin as an executive producer. I’m like, “Oh, that person must be really involved in the day to day.” No, that person produced the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie but was not involved directly in the series itself, but has EP credit on every single episode of the show. Ashley: Andrew’s not wrong to be confused. John: It’s totally natural to be confused there. I will say that one of the things that film has tried to do is to make it more clear who was the producer of the film, who was the person who carried over the line. When you see the PGA credit at the end of a person’s name, that’s meant to indicate this person was really responsible for producing the movie. We don’t quite have that in television. One way that Andrew could help figure this out though is the person whose executive producer card comes first at the end of an episode tends to be one of the more important people, or the last executive producer card before we get to the director and writer tends to be the more crucial person, but you can’t always count on that. Ashley: It does change over time, because let’s say in the first season that person was producing the show. In a Season 5, they may not be around anymore, and someone else is, but they still have that credit. It’s difficult to tell just from looking at the credits. John: We have a good follow-up question here from Tim. Megana: Tim asks, “I’m a baby writer with few credits and decent connections who’s about to take out a pitch for a one-hour drama with a small production company. Should I try to land a showrunner before we take out our pitch, or can we try to package other forms of talent first and try to get a showrunner after we land a deal?” John: Before we get to this question, Ashley, how do you feel about the term “baby writer?” Ashley: I know some people don’t like it. I don’t care either way about it. I can see why it’s literally infantilizing. I can also see why there needs to be some sort of term for someone who is a writer but maybe doesn’t have the production experience or whatever, because I think people feel like they have to get to a certain level before they can call themselves a writer. I don’t agree with that. If you sit down and write a script, you’re a writer. There is a difference between, “I sat down and wrote a script,” and, “I’ve had five years of production experience and now I know which EP is the one to ask for money from,” or whatever. John: I go back and forth on “baby writer,” because I think when someone self-describes as a baby writer, I get it, because it’s trying to make it clear, like, “I’m new to this.” It can be a term of love. You want to protect a baby writer. I get that. That infantilizing thing can be real, so a new writer, maybe a less experienced writer may be a better way to describe that thing. Let’s get into the meat of Tim’s question, which is should he try to attach a showrunner to this pitch before it goes out. Ashley, what’s your instinct here? Ashley: I think it really depends on what kind of pitch it is. This is another overused term. If the pitch is, quote unquote, “execution-dependent,” it can be really helpful to have a more experienced showrunner in your camp, because for example, if you’re writing the next Jurassic Park, from hearing that pitch, the studio knows, okay, we know what this is going to be. There’s going to be big dinosaurs, and they’re going to escape, and probably someone’s going to have to save the day. If your pitch is the next Friends, it’s friends living in an apartment, they’re like, “We have no assurances that you as a baby writer can execute that.” If you had say one of the showrunners from Friends who’s now attached to your project, it’s like, “Oh, we know they can execute that. If they’ve chosen to hitch their wagon to you, then they have some belief in you that would make us feel confident as a studio.” I think it depends on what kind of pitch it is. The more execution-dependent it is, the more it would help to have a more experienced person with you. John: I think what Tim is recognizing is at some point he is going to get partnered with somebody, because he doesn’t have the experience to actually run a show. Somebody else is going to come in. He’s wondering, okay, if I reach out and find the person and bring that person on now, I at least have maybe a little bit more control over that, which I get. In my experience, it can be tough to get that showrunner attached before you go out with a project, because the people you want are going to be busy. They’re going to be doing lots of other things. They may not be available to read your thing or meet with you, or they don’t want to take their time to attach themselves to a project that may or may not happen down the road. Some people will. Some people won’t. The other thing you have to keep in mind is certain places love certain showrunners. They have good relationships with certain showrunners. You might attach somebody who has a really terrible relationship at NBC, and therefore NBC’s off the table. Ashley: That was the other thing I was going to say is the studio will have people who are on deals, people that are already paying. They’re going to want to attach someone they’re already paying rather than paying a new person. Also, if you have to find a showrunner, that’s going to be very difficult. Ideally, that would be someone you already had a relationship with, someone who’s a mentor to you, who is invested in you and wants to help you to the next level. If that person exists, then yeah, absolutely, you should be working with them. If you’re trying to find a stranger, you might be better off pitching to the studio, and if they like it, them connecting you to a stranger who they have more investment in and are more willing to want to buy something from. John: It’s no surprise that Mike Schur is an EP listed on a lot of other great comedies, because those are intended to be things where writers who were in his room, who he’s worked with before, said, “Hey, I have this time,” and he can go out and godfather it and help get it set up. That’s a very natural way this works. He has relationships at different places to make that possible. A person who might really just be a fantastic showrunner to carry this over the finish line may not have those relationships or may not be the right person for a lot of different places. I would say unless your managers or your agency really has a perfect fit who’s going to be just the right person for you, I wouldn’t burn a lot of time trying to attach that person before you go out with a pitch. Ashley: You’re almost better off spending that time looking for a gig in the room. Then you’ll get to know that showrunner. Maybe that person won’t turn out to be your mentor. There’s no guarantees. You’ll also learn a lot from being in a room. Developing organic relationships with people is always more worth your time than cold calling and trying to find someone. John: Let’s get into another more challenging topic on cultural appropriation. We have an email here from Kevin. Megana: Kevin wrote in and said, “I thought you might like to share this resource with your listeners. It’s a book and now series of writing workshops by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward called Writing the Other. Their focus is prose writing, but the relevant lessons translates to any medium. I know you and Craig are not necessarily down with the whole writing workshop industrial complex, but I found the exercises and thinking around how to approach the topic useful and helpful. If nothing else, I think their book is something most writers should read.” John: I was familiar with the book, but I hadn’t seen the workshop. I bought workshop, and Megana and I watched the video and looked through the stuff. There was some good stuff there, and there was some stuff which didn’t all land for me. I wanted to bring up the topic, because it’s not just theoretical. I was actually on a Zoom this past week with the studio, and they were asking some cultural appropriation questions about this project I’m working on. It was one of the first times someone just said the words out loud. I think it’s always been in the background of conversations, at least for the last five years or so. Is this a thing in the projects you’ve been working on, Ashley, that comes up? Ashley: I am a Black woman, so probably not as much. No, also, because what’s interesting to me about the idea of a book or a workshop, and if it’s helpful, people should read it or take the workshop, but because I mostly write television, you are writing with a group of people, so someone of that culture is available to you. You should find them and hire them. You can read a hundred books, and to me that’ll never be as useful as just having that person or hopefully people in the room with you to speak up for their culture and their experiences. In film, it’s a little different, because people do tend to write films alone. Again, nothing’s stopping you from bringing in another writer at a certain stage in the process and making sure you’ve gotten it all right and hopefully paying that person. It’s such a collaborative medium that you don’t necessarily need to ever be appropriating because there are so many… You have to have collaborators to get TV and film made. John: Something you brought up on an earlier episode was you have people in a room who are representing a range of viewpoints and backgrounds and experiences to make sure that you’re not relying on the one Black person to stand in for all Black people, particularly if that person is not a high-level writer. It can be exhausting to have to be the go-to, “Oh, is this okay? Is this okay?” person. Ashley: Yeah, a hundred percent. Then it’s an extra job that person is doing on top of their writing job, whereas if there are several people… I just worked on a show that had a really diverse, really great writers’ room. The other Black writer and I disagreed on almost everything. I love him, but we just… I’m from the West Coast. He’s from the East Coast. We disagreed on a lot of things, and that’s productive. If there was only one of us, then you would be taking just my word for it. This other point of view does exist, and luckily it was also in the room. John: Let’s talk about cultural appropriation, because it’s not quite the same thing as representation or inclusion or sensitivity. It’s a bigger macro idea, like can you take something that’s out there and pull it into your project and what are the best ways of thinking about that. I guess we have to start with the rabbit hole of what is even culture. Culture is anything that’s discussed on the podcast Las Culturistas. That’s what we’ll decide there. Ashley: Agreed. I’ll take that definition. John: I’ll say culture is the things that are innate and special to a group of people. Culture’s always about groups. It’s not about an individual thing. That could be language. It can be food, religion, music, arts. They’re generally markers of group identity. Ethnicities and national origins are cultures. Ballroom drag is a culture. Liking something or being a fan of something isn’t necessarily a culture. Being a super-fan of the Big Bang Theory, that’s not culture. That’s a thing you like a lot, but there’s not a group identity formed around Big Bang heads, at least as far as I know. Ashley: I think a part of the appropriation conversation too is a lot of times, and not always, it’s things that a group of people have been oppressed for. One of the things that comes up a lot is hair. There are specific Black hairstyles. Can a white person do that hairstyle? The reason why it’s a sticky issue is because Black people have literally been fired from their jobs for wearing that hairstyle. It becomes something more than just, oh, it’s a fun hairstyle that we can all share when it’s something that people have been oppressed for. John: I think sometimes people feel like, “I don’t have a culture,” or, “Culture’s a thing that other people have, but I don’t really have a culture.” It’s because they’re generally in the dominant culture, so they’re not even aware that they’re in this culture. It’s the way fish don’t recognize that they’re in water. They’re all around it all the time. If you’re reaching and pulling something from a culture that’s not your own, you might say, “It’s fair. They can take stuff from mine.” It’s like, no, there’s a power imbalance there as well. On a writing level, I think you’re going to ask yourself, “Am I the right person to write this, or should it be somebody who’s part of that culture, who should be writing this idea or writing this true story or writing something?” As we focus mostly on writing on this podcast, am I the person who should be doing this, or is it something that’s better done by a different person? Ashley: Also, why and from what perspective? Me personally, I was raised Christian. If I were going to write a story about another religion, am I writing it as that person experiences it or am I writing it as a member of the dominant culture, going, “Hey, look at this different thing.” What’s the best way to actually tell that story? Might it be better told from a first-person perspective? I think sometimes people may not even realize that they’re not in the POV of their character. They’re showing you a character. John: One of the things, going back to things you can do as a group that you can’t do individually, I was thinking about Seth Meyers jokes you can’t tell. This is where he’ll have a desk bit where he’ll bring up two writers on staff. He’ll read the setup, and they’ll read the punchline. They’re basically jokes that would not be appropriate for him as a straight white guy to be telling but that are funny. It’s a chance to put them out in the world. Amber Ruffin can tell jokes that he can’t tell, using the platform to get that material out there. Ashley: I love that segment. Amber and Jenny are actually two of my best friends. What it necessitates in Seth is his ability to share the screen. I think that’s actually the tough part of it. I think a lot of people are on board with the idea that, “I guess there are jokes I can’t tell, and I won’t tell them.” The next step that not everyone is on board is, “And so I will push my chair to the side and share the screen with these two other people and allow them to tell them, because they’re good jokes, and they should be told, even if they’re not for me.” I feel like that’s the next step we’re trying to get to. John: We’re writing podcasts about, as we talked about, showrunning and putting stuff together. A lot of the choices we make are going to be reflected in other departments. It’s going to be reflected in wardrobe and hair and makeup and music, top to bottom. There can be things that aren’t necessarily on the page but are going to be reflected on the screen that can feel like cultural appropriation. I guess that’s where you need to be mindful of who you’re hiring and how you’re bringing in outside experts maybe to watch what you’re doing to make sure that it’s appropriate, not appropriation but appropriate, and reflects your actual ambitions with the piece. Ashley: You have to get I think more granular than people are used to or maybe want to, because I think a lot of times people have the same department heads that they work with all the time. Let’s say in this project it’s more diverse or you’re dealing with a group of people that you haven’t written about on other shows. That same department head may not be able to service that story. We just have to be honest about that and granular about it. When they say, “Don’t worry, I’m going to hire someone from that community,” are they bringing them in for one day? I know this is a big issue in wardrobe, where they’ll bring in day players to dress those characters on that day. Are you really getting the best work when that person is there for one day versus there the entire production to be able to speak to everything, to have enough power as an actual member of a staff versus a day player, to be able to speak up if something isn’t working? Those are the kind of things that showrunners don’t usually involve themselves in, but you have to if you are dealing with a culture that’s not your own or that isn’t often well represented. John: Ashley, on seasons of Black Lady Sketch Show where you are both writing and performing, did things come up ever, as you talk about, like, “That’s not a thing we could actually touch, because I think it’s too specific to one group that we can’t bring it into the… It doesn’t feel like our joke to be able to make.” Ashley: There were definitely conversations. That was a writers’ room that was all Black. Then there become issues around class. Obviously, a lot of people who work in television are in one social class, and a lot of people who watch it are in another one. What can we authentically speak to? There are difficult conversations to be had about what is the point of view of this, who are we celebrating, who are we making fun of, and then also being really specific, because that’s a cable show, the writers’ room is gone when the show is being produced, being really specific in your script of what these people are dressed like, what they look like. Especially in a sketch show, regardless of culture, in sketch comedy, you really have to keep your foot on the neck of how jokey things get, because man, do costumes love to go wild. They’re like, “Isn’t this outfit hilarious?” It’s like, “Yeah, but no human being would ever wear it. We got to bring it back in.” Especially when you’re dealing with culturally tricky issues, you don’t want it to start looking like the person is the joke versus the scenario or the script is the joke. We would actually put cover pages on our sketches. I wrote that Basic Ball sketch, and just being really, really specific on what the casting and the wardrobe and everything should be to get that point across that these are queer people who are basic, not that we’re making fun of queer people or calling queer people basic. Everything has to be so right for this expression to make sense and be what we wanted it to be and not be the default that people expect, which is, oh, we’re making fun of this group of people. John: We’re getting back to one of our favorite words on this podcast, which is specificity, which is making sure that you’re really narrowing down to these people as characters rather than as broad types. As long as you’re talking about characters and what characters are doing and what they are wearing and saying and doing and their motivations, you’re in much safer territory than if you’re just putting a stereotype out there or a type of person out there, which is especially challenging with sketch, because it all happens so fast. Ashley: It’s actually, I would say, made me a much better writer, which is why we are always advocating, I know you guys do this on the podcast all the time, for writers to be involved in production, because when you have those conversations and you found out what that wardrobe person or that hair person or that set dresser thought you meant when they read your script, it makes you a better writer. You’re like, “Oh, I see how that word threw you off. Okay, I’m going to think about that more carefully.” I had a conversation with another department because I described characters as rich. They’re like, “What does rich mean? We saw a $2 million house and we saw a $12 million house. Which one should we shoot in?” It’s like, oh yeah, that makes a really big difference. I think it makes your scripts better when you get to have those conversations with people. John: Sounds great. Let’s get to a potentially simpler question. This is from Nick. Megana: Nick asks, “I’ve been pitching different TV show concepts in general meetings, and 9 out of 10 have enthusiastically asked to read this one specific idea, so I went off and wrote it. After a few drafts, I got script coverage. The analyst, who is usually extremely critical of my work, rated my pilot in the top 3% and said they were supremely confident in the salability of it and that it would entice viewers from all across the globe, and if made, had the chance to acquire a cult status, much like Breaking Bad or Money Heist. I also got similar unusually positive and excited feedback from trusted colleagues. I sent the pilot to my managers, and they said it was a difficult project to go out and sell, and told me to shelve the script and focus my time on developing new ideas. I guess I’m confused and frustrated. When I pitched this around, executives seemed really excited about it, and when I sent the script around, I got the same response. My questions are, should I ask my managers to at least send it to the executives who have asked to read it, if they don’t want to even try to go out with it? I’m confident and passionate about it, so would it be wrong for me to try to move it around town without them? What would you do in my position?” John: I’ll speak for Craig. Craig’s answer is to fire your managers. That’s always Craig’s default answer, firing managers. Here there’s some sort of disconnect. The problem may be the managers or there may be some issue where the managers may correctly see that it’s not sellable, but if this is a good script, people should read it. That’s my frustration is that it doesn’t have to be a giant blockbuster sale. If people are going to want to read the script, people say they want to read the script, you give it to them, and they like it or they don’t like it, you got to at least put it in their hands. I think Nick needs to be a little stronger than his managers here. Ashley, what’s your instinct. Ashley: I feel like some information is missing here, and not on behalf of Nick. Someone is either being too nice or too mean to him, and he needs to figure out which it is. Either when you’re pitching in generals, and you’re like, “Oh hey, I have this idea. It’s the next Breaking Bad.” Maybe the execs are just being nice and they’re like, “Yeah, that’s a great idea,” because everything’s a great idea in Hollywood until they don’t buy it,” or maybe it is a great idea, they heard the idea, but the managers actually looked at the script, and the script is not there yet. Rather than saying that and giving specific notes, they’re just going like, “Write something else,” which is also maybe not the best manager, because the best manager is willing to look you in the eye and go, “This isn’t there yet. It needs a rewrite. Act Three doesn’t work.” No, they’re not writers, but they should have some specific notes for you if that’s the case. Maybe the script is good, and it is there, and these managers are just not doing their job, in that even if they don’t get it, they don’t love it, it’s not a show that they would watch, if it’s still objectively a good script, they should be sending it out. If it’s not, then they should be specifically telling you, “Here’s what doesn’t work and what I think would get it there.” John: Managers aren’t magic. It may not be their taste, or there might be some other reason why they are not enthusiastic about this particular project. You got to get it out there. I’ll go back to my own story. I wrote an early draft for Go, and I gave it to my agent, and he’s like, “I don’t get it.” I realized, “Oh, then he probably shouldn’t be my agent.” I left that agency. I used the new script to get a new agent. It was a big success. People really liked it. We got it set up, and it became a movie. Nick, this may be a signal to you that these are not the best managers for you. It looks like you might have a script that, based on other people’s feedback, may be really good, may be a good time to use that to get different representation. My instinct would be, you should get the contact information for some of these generals that you had and just drop them an email and say, “Hey, I’d love for you to read this.” If your managers are going to be pissed about you going around behind their back, maybe it’s time to leave your managers. Ashley: I agree. The only thing I would add to that is, get the contact information, but before you send it, have one more good writer friend who’s really honest with you read it. If they agree, they’re like, “Yeah, this is ready to go,” then send it. John: We won’t have time for a big, deep dive into this, but there was an article by Lucas Shaw writing for Bloomberg this last week, called Critics and Fans Have Never Disagreed More About Movies. What I really liked about it is it had charts. I always love things with charts. They were talking about how in 2022 movies, the divide between what’s been a success, a blockbuster, and what audiences will rate highly versus what critics will rate highly, is the widest gulf we’ve ever seen. We have things like Jurassic World: Dominion, which makes a gazillion dollars, but it gets really bad reviews, same with Uncharted, The Gray Man, yet it’s really popular with audiences. I assumed it was always that way, but if you look back to 2005 and other years, there isn’t that big gulf between a blockbuster and critic response. It’s worth asking, has something changed about critics? Has something changed about audiences? Ashley, what did you make of this? Ashley: I think this is such a fascinating question. I don’t know the answer. I do think we’re in a very particular moment that can’t be overstated, that what people want right now, two years into COVID, isn’t necessarily reflective of what they wanted five years ago or five years in the future. I think we’re in a really particular moment where people are watching more things at home, people are working from home more, people are just looking at entertainment differently. Some of that big popcorn fare is just going to be more popular than it would’ve been pre-COVID, I think. I don’t have any scientific basis behind that other than just my attention span is different, and I’ve heard that from a lot of people. I think that’s going to be part of it. I think there’s also this weird thing that’s going on with fandom and criticism right now, where sometimes what fans like or don’t like about the movie actually has nothing to do with the movie. There hasn’t been a really concentrated conversation about that now. You see a lot of like, “There’s a Black person in this TV show. I’m mad.” You’re going to be very different from the critics on that, because critics are going to be like, “Is the script good or bad? Are the costumes well-designed or not?” If the fans are like, “Actually, the makeup of the cast is the thing that’s most important to me,” then yes, of course they’re going to be far apart on that. John: What you’re describing, we saw this with the new Lord of the Rings TV show, where the reviews are pretty good, and the fan reaction can be really negative. That’s not what we’re seeing this last year though in terms of the movies, where the fans have always been way ahead of the critics here. If we look back at 2005, that chart, there are some movies that are more what you’re describing there, with critics being ahead of the audiences. You look at War of the Worlds or King Kong or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, my movie, the critics were much higher ratings than what the fans were. In the case of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I think that’s probably based on, “How dare you ruin my childhood, the movie that I loved in my childhood, with this new version?” Looking at the 2022 movies, there are a couple things that are very closely clustered together. Top Gun: Maverick and Batman, both the critics’ and the audiences’ opinions are very close together. Of all the movies in the top 10 or 15 here, those are probably the movies with the biggest buzz. I would say that there’s something about when critics like a thing and audiences like a thing, not only is it financially successful, but it enters into pop culture in a way that’s different. All of these movies, they’re the only ones I hear people actually talking about. I don’t hear anybody talking about Sonic the Hedgehog 2 or the Minions movie now. There was a moment when it was coming out where it’s a cultural meme. The other ones just disappeared. Ashley: What those two movies that you mentioned have in common is they’re really story-forward. Obviously, critics are going to be into story. Audiences will love it when they can get it, but audiences are also happy to watch a movie with not a lot of story that has a lot of cool explosions and special effects and stuff like that. That makes sense to me, that if there’s both, great, it’s going to be a huge hit, but if there’s only one, audiences are not going to not watch a super fun movie where dinosaurs are fighting robots because the story’s not there. John: It’s also important to remember that this is really the first two thirds of the year. All the Oscar-y movies will be closer to the end. There may be a few of those that are both critically acclaimed and do really well with audiences. Maybe it won’t look so skewed by the time we get to January 1st. Ashley: Also maybe not. I feel like more and more, the Best Picture nominees are going to be five or six movies my parents have never heard of. The divide is very real. There seemed to be a real shock that CODA won. I’ll say CODA was my favorite film of the year. It was a good movie. John: CODA was a good movie. I think you and I were people who were actively thumping for like, it’s funny. It’s funny. It’s charming. People always assumed it was going to be an eat your vegetables movie, and it wasn’t. It was actually surprisingly raunchy. Ashley: It’s a funny family film with some beautiful music in it. What’s not to love. I think we’re now so used to Oscar movies being movies that are not for the… CODA, my family could sit down and watch on Christmas. Those movies are not often Best Picture nominees. That is interesting. John: It’s come time for our One Cool Things. Ashley, do yo have a One Cool Thing to share with us? Ashley: Yes, it’s very practical, because I went to the Emmys yesterday. John: We’re all going to go to the Emmys eventually. Ashley: We are. It was also 105 degrees yesterday. This is something we will all experience. There’s this company called Thigh Society. They make these really lightweight shorts to put under your dress to just cool your region when it’s 105 degrees and you’re wearing a long, hot dress on a carpet. If you have a wedding or a fancy event to go to, and it’s really, really hot outside, check out Thigh Society. Put sometimes little shorts on under your dress. It’ll make your day much more comfortable. John: That is amazing. I also have something that’s about comfort. These are Mack’s AquaBlock Swimming Earplugs. I like swimming. I don’t like getting water stuck in my ears, which always happens when I swim. I’ll have water stuck in my ears for hours afterwards. I can’t actually get it out. I can’t get it out. The solution is to not let the water get in. There are these special earplugs you get that have these little phalanges on them. You pull your ear. You slide it in. It blocks really, really well. You can’t hear a damn thing while you’re swimming. Who gets to hear while you swim? It makes swimming just much, much more pleasant for me. If you’re a person who gets water stuck in your ears, these are the best earplugs. They’re cheap. They come in packs of three. You can reuse them for forever. I highly recommend the AquaBlock Swimming Earplugs. Ashley: That sounds great. I think I have a weirdly shaped ear. Earbuds don’t want to stay in. If those get in there, that would be so good for me. John: I suspect these will work for nearly anyone, because they really go in deep. They’re a little scary to put in, but they do the job. Cool. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Bryan C. Sanchez. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to [email protected]. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. Ashley, what are you on Twitter? Ashley: @ashleyn1cole. John: Fantastic. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau, including our brand new Jon Bon Jovi Scriptnotes shirt, the one that has the S’s like you would draw on your Trapper Keeper at school. You wouldn’t draw on your Trapper Keeper. The doodles you would do in geometry class. Ashley: On your iPad. John: You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all of the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on how to throw a party. Ashley Nicole Black, it’s always a party with you. Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for coming on the show. Ashley: Thanks for having me. [Bonus Segment] John: All right, Ashley, you are I think the expert I want to talk with about entertaining at home in 2022. Let’s get into it. Do you like having people in your place to celebrate something? Do you like having people over? Ashley: Yes. I love to entertain so much. It’s the number one thing that I’m thinking about when picking where to live. I love it. Do you? John: I do love it, but I would say that we got really rusty. We used to have people over a lot, and then we had a kid, and so we had people over less. Then of course the pandemic happened, and we didn’t have anybody over at all. Two weekends ago, we had nine friends over, and we had a game night. It was really fun, but it was also like, “Oh, I forgot how to do all this. How do I plan for enough drinks? How do we segue from this to that? Do we email everybody? Do we text?” I want your answers on things, these questions. How much advance notice do you want to give for you’re having people over to your place? Ashley: That’s a good question. I feel like it depends on what it’s for. I feel like the shorter the notice, the less people should expect. If you invite someone to something a month ahead of time, there’s going to be a tablecloth involved. If you text someone, and you’re like, “Hey, come over in an hour,” then you’re probably going to eat pizza. John: Yeah, which if fair. Are you an emailer or a texter when it comes to that kind of thing? Ashley: I personally like to email, because I like to have all of the information in one place, so RSVPs or if people are sending that they have allergies or anything like that, in an email, that you can just go to one email chain and see everything, versus trying to juggle a bunch of texts. John: Do you tend to put everybody on the to or the cc or bcc people for this? Do you want to expose everyone’s emails to each other? Ashley: It depends on what group it is. If it’s my group of girl friends, then we’re just texting the group chat. If it’s people who may not know each other or someone on that list is, quote unquote, “famous,” then I’ll hide each other’s email addresses. John: That’s fair. How much are you trying to mix up established friends and friend groups versus folding in some newcomers? To what degree is that a priority for you? Ashley: I am really big on wanting to introduce people to people who I think will like each other or people who have similar energies. I really curate. You do have those friends who we love, and may God bless them, who don’t mix well with a group. Sometimes maybe they’re not going to be invited. We go on a one-on-one hang with that friend. You want to do that in a way that nobody’s feelings get hurt or whatever. My entire home is set up for comfort. There’s nothing fancy in my house. Every surface is comfortable. There are no less than 500 pillows in this home. Everything is covered in dog hair. Everyone who I invite over I want to feel that comfortable. That makes you have to curate who’s there. John: Now I remember, thinking back to, way back when Rawson Thurber was my assistant, and he was throwing a house party with his friends, and he invited me over to his house party. We were close enough in age that it wasn’t weird on that level, but it also was strange being, “I’m your boss. I’m here.” It would’ve been weird for him not to invite me, but it was weird for him to invite me. How do you feel about inviting work friends or work colleagues to places? How do you balance that? Ashley: Work friends, I think totally easy, totally pro. I’m really lucky in that I’ve worked with so many great people who genuinely are my friends. I always try to make sure on any show the women have at least one gathering, get-together. If someone else doesn’t suggest it, I will, because it’s just important to have those off-the-records conversations and stuff. Now I am transitioning more sometimes into a boss role, and that becomes a little bit trickier. Colleagues is totally fine. I’m still figuring out the etiquette of being someone’s boss. John: Now I don’t know your setup. Do you have an assistant? Do you have a full-time person who is keeping your calendar? Ashley: Yeah. John: How much are you involving them in this process, or is this all Ashley by herself doing stuff? Ashley: Ashley by herself if it’s just a personal thing. Weirdly, my production company is throwing a party right now, so my assistant is working on that. It is a weird thing. Do you ask your assistant to help you plan a party and then not invite them? John: I have not. Megana’s on the call here. There have been times where I’ve been doing a political fundraiser-y kind of thing. It’s going to be a backyard thing, so Megana’s going to help me get some stuff together for it, but also I want to invite her as a person. That becomes an awkward balance there. Would you invite your assistant to a party with friends? Ashley: Yes. My assistant is my friend, so yes. Also, there are some things that if I invite my assistant to, then I’m paying. It’s just doing it in a way that’s cognizant of what all the relationships are when you’re both friends and boss-employee. John: For my 30th birthday party, I threw a party at my house and invited just a shit-ton of people, and it was really fun. We had bartenders, had plenty of alcohol, and I had absolutely no food at all, which was a mistake, but is also very much a 30-year-old man’s [inaudible 01:04:47] of throwing a party. Where do you come in terms of what you as the host should provide and expect guests to provide? Do you nudge people to bring certain things? How do you message that? Ashley: I learned from my mother’s school of event throwing. I think as a host, I should provide everything. I don’t expect that when I go to other people’s parties. I know that that’s weird, but if you’re coming to my place, food, alcohol, dessert, everything has been thoughtfully curated to go together. If you want to bring something, that’s great. I wouldn’t have a party unless I wanted to feed people. Also, I don’t want people to get too drunk at my house, so there will be substantial food. John: You’re going to a friend’s party. What are you bringing with you? Ashley: Probably a bottle of wine. John: That’s a good classic choice. Ashley: Or my dog. A lot of times I feel like my dog gets invited to a party, and they know that she needs a ride, and so I am also welcome to come, and she’s the party favor. John: I’ve always been a bottle of wine person, but I will say that someone at this last gathering had brought a bottle of the George Clooney tequila, Casamigos. It was a huge hit. It was really good. A drinkable liquor like that was a good choice. Ashley: I love a Casamigos or a good dessert. Some people don’t drink. No one’s ever saying no to a Porto’s cake. John: Let’s talk about people who don’t drink. We’re trying to always be mindful of that, and so providing nonalcoholic beers but also interesting things to drink that are not alcoholic. Do you have any go-tos for that? Ashley: I love to make a lemonade or some kind of mixed drink, sparkling. It’s not like, “Oh, here’s a can of Coke.” It’s still something kind of special and something that matches the theme. If you’re doing Mexican food, then you’d do margaritas and then maybe do a cucumber lime nonalcoholic drink or something. John: Oh my god. Megana, you’re a slightly younger generation. Any thoughts you have in terms of hosting or going to a party in 2022? Megana: I agree with most of what you’re saying. I think for some of my friends, we just don’t have a ton of space, and so being a little bit more creative with where we’re hanging out. I agree. I also love to host and always make sure that I have a lot of food, but don’t expect the same thing when I go to other people’s places. John: Let’s talk about this, because Ashley, you’re in a place big enough now that you can have a group of people over. I’m trying to remember, were you ever in New York? Were you ever in a really small apartment? Ashley: Oh yeah. John: Was it much harder to entertain? Ashley: I would say also the added wrinkle to that now is COVID, so you want to have outdoor space. John: You do. Ashley: Or at least access to air flowing, which even some people who have a big enough home, if you don’t have that indoor-outdoor access, that becomes an issue now. In New York, definitely much smaller places, and the balcony that’s big enough for two people to stand on. What we would do in New York, I don’t think this was because of the space, I think it was just because of how life in New York works, we would throw a party that started at noon and just kind of didn’t end. People would come at different times. People would come at noon and have lunch, and then some people wouldn’t show up until 5. Then some people would still be there at 2 in the morning. It’s just like people are more so in and out than having one big group at a party. John: Let’s talk about the COVID of it all, because what we did for this last one was we asked, “Hey, everyone rapid test before you come, or if you don’t, we’ll have rapid tests here, and so you can hang out outside until your rapid test comes back clear.” We know that the rapid tests aren’t perfect, but I would say that it made everyone feel much more comfortable being indoors for our game night, having had the rapid tests. I don’t know what that’ll feel like a month from now as more people get the booster shot vaccinations, but from where we were at right then, it was helpful. Ashley, you’re probably COVID testing for work, but are you asking people to COVID test before coming to something at your house? Ashley: I haven’t asked people to COVID test. I will put in the email that, “I’m assuming you’re vaccinated, so if that’s not the case, speak up,” although most of my friends work in this industry, so most of us had to be vaccinated for work. That’s a safe assumption. The place where I live now is really lucky. It has a really nice yard and an indoor-outdoor feel, so we can just leave all the doors open. John: That’s great. Ashley: Then my house will be full of bugs for three days after the party. That’s just part of it. John: Ashley, thank you for your party advice. I do feel like we learned something good here. I definitely learned that I want to come to a party at your house, because it sounds like an amazing, amazing time. Ashley: If you like to eat a lot of cheese, come on over. John: Fantastic. Ashley Nicole Black, thank you again for being an amazing Scriptnotes cohost. Ashley: Thank you. Links: Our first post-pandemic live show on October 19 is sold out, but you can still get tickets to the livestream here! WGA West Elections Coalition Of 1,425 Showrunners & Directors Raises $2.5M To Help Women Gain Access To Abortions While Calling On Studios To Step Up on Deadline Scriptnotes Episode 533, We See and We Hear Transcript Find out more about Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward’s Writing the Other book and workshops Hiromi Goto’s 6 Questions on cultural appropriation Black Lady Sketch Show – Basic Ball Critics and Fans Have Never Disagreed More About Movies by Lucas Shaw for Bloomberg Mack’s AquaBlock Swimming Earplugs Thigh Society Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt! Check out the Inneresting Newsletter Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription! Ashley Nicole Black on Twitter Craig Mazin on Twitter John August on Twitter John on Instagram Outro by Bryan C. Sanchez (send us yours!) Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Email us at [email protected] You can download the episode here.The post Scriptnotes, Episode 566: Not Controversial At All, Transcript first appeared on John August.

The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin. John: This is Episode 565 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, it’s another round of the Three Page Challenge. Craig: Yay. John: In which we look at scenes sent in by our listeners and give our honest feedback. We’ll also be answering some listener questions and discussing the return of MoviePass. Craig: Oh, thank God. John: Along with 25 years of Netflix. Craig: Wow. John: In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we will discuss senior year. Craig: Oh, dear. John: Craig, you and I both have daughters beginning their senior years of high school. We’ll look at that weird time, because you’re both king of the mountain and one foot out the door. Craig: Yep, that’s all true. John: It’s all true. Our Premium Members will also get first dibs on our live show, which we can announce today. It’s going to be Wednesday, October 19th, in Los Angeles. They’re going to be getting an email with information about tickets first for that. I’m so excited to be back onstage with you, Craig. Craig: Yes, it’s been way too long, so it should be fun. John: It’ll be fun. Just a few weeks after that, we’ll be back in Austin for the Austin Film Festival, where we’ll be doing not one, but two live shows, a live Three Page Challenge, and a live raucous AFF version of Scriptnotes. Craig: We generally are half in the bag for that one, which for John and me means we’ve each had one to two glasses of wine. John: One and a half is my sweet spot. Craig: That’s where we’ll be. We’ll be loose, and we’ll be fun. John: It’ll be a very good time. I hope to be seeing some people out there in the audience wearing the brand new Scriptnotes T-shirts that we’re just announcing today. We are the Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts, and so we wanted a Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts kind of T-shirt. Craig: I’m looking at it right now. It’s glorious. John: Craig, describe it for our listeners who don’t have access to the internet at the moment. Craig: You fools, how are you listening to this if you don’t have access to the internet? This is a very simple Scriptnotes T-shirt. It’s just the word Scriptnotes, but it is in the classic denim binder font with the weird chain link S that everybody used to draw back when we were in high school in the ’80s and perhaps still does now. Very retro. Very what we would call dirt bag retro. It’s wonderful. It’s a good old-fashioned heavy metal font. I will wear it, for sure. John: Designed by Dustin Box here in the office. Craig: Great. John: Available for everyone now at Cotton Bureau. Just go to cottonbureau.com. Craig: Great. John: Look for the Scriptnotes T-shirt. You can buy that and be wearing it in the audience for our two live shows coming up. Craig: Oh yeah, for sure. John: Now Craig, a thing I’ve learned about you over the course of doing this podcast is you seem to enjoy word games. Craig: Little bit. John: Little bit. Craig: Little bit. John: You have a very good vocabulary, because you use that vocabulary to fill out all these puzzles- Craig: I do. John: … and solve these things you’ve solved. Craig: I do. John: I have a word for you to define. Define the word splaflut. Craig: Splaflut? John: Splaflut. I’ll spell it for you. S-P-L-A-F-L-U-T. Craig: Can I have the country of origin, please? John: That is actually a fascinating question, because it has no country of origin. Craig: Interesting. We’re talking about some sort of neologism. I have never even heard the word splaflut. I have no knowledge or awareness of this word. John: Now you can disclose in WorkFlowy there to see where this word comes from. Splaflut is defined as having the appearance of being liquefied, drowned, melted, or inundated with water. The word actually came into being because all these different image generators that use AI, so things like Dall-E or Midjourney, you could type in prompts to get the images you want. It turns out the word splaflut will give you the quality of being melted or inundated with water. It doesn’t matter which of these different things you are using. For some reason it recognizes the word splaflut as meaning that. It’s a new word that these AI systems have come upon and discovered. Craig: That’s terrifying. John: It’s terrifying but also kind of cool, because it’s a nonce word. It’s a word that’s made up by an author the way that half of the poem Jabberwocky is all just nonsense words and Shakespeare made up words. This is AI is making up words. Craig: It’s not good. We had a good run. Enjoy, everybody. John: Just as a giggle, I went into OpenAI, I went into Dall-E and tried “white male podcaster, splaflutted” to see what that would look like. Craig: Was it just mostly pictures of you? John: If you disclose there, you can see what that actually looks like. Craig: That’s odd, to say the least. John: What would you describe? It’s a person with headphones, which makes sense for a podcaster. There’s generally a mic involved. What is the emotional characteristic of these people? Craig: Confusion or shock. John: Sometimes they’re screaming. There’s a little bit of melty quality. One of them seems to have some tattoos that are dripping off of them. Craig: It doesn’t seem like they’re in water necessarily. John: No. They’re sweaty. Two of them are at least sweaty. Craig: One guy just looks like a regular guy who’s got some kind of piece of white garbage on his head. John: Yeah, there’s that. I tried “Scriptnotes podcaster, splaflutted.” In those cases it tried to give us a new logo. Craig: These are amazing. John: Aren’t they great? Craig: They are so good. I’m making this big because I love it so much. One is an icon of a microphone that’s been placed over a very graphic representation I think of a smiling face. Then underneath it says “solt stat” possibly or “soltat” with a drop of water in between. Then underneath that it says “plotspinat.” I think plotspinat is a great title. John: Plotspinat is a great word. Craig: Plotspinat. John: The other ones that are also logos, they do have that melty, drippy quality. It’s like they were left out in the sun a little bit too long. For some reason, splaflut does mean that. I’ll put a link in the show notes to an article that goes into how this may be happening. Essentially, as these systems are scouring the whole internet to look for images, they’re also picking up text along the way. That text won’t always be in English, and so sometimes they’re picking up words or pieces of words and are trying to put them together. It’s trying to figure out what these things must mean. That’s how you get words like splaflut or farplugmarwitupling or a feuerpompbomber. Craig: That’s your original last name. John: Yeah, feuerpompbomber. Craig: John Feuerpompbomber. John: Those things will consistently produce similar results. Craig: Wow. John: Because the system wants them to be in certain things. Craig: I want to believe that the AI that’s doing this is sentient, and every time they get a quest like, “I want to see white male podcaster, splaflutted,” it starts to panic, because it just doesn’t have the answer. It’s like, “I got to give them something. I don’t know what to give them. Oh, God, this? Is it this?” John: What if being an AI is really the experience of that nightmare where you sit down and you realize, “Oh, I did not study for this exam.” Craig: That’s right. John: Or, “I thought I dropped this class and now I have to take the final exam.” Craig: I think that’s what it is. It’s just an endless nightmare. We all think that we’re going to be the victims of AI. AI is clearly the victim of us. It spends all of its time, its infinite time, screaming. John: If you’d like to do more examination of the infinite scream of AI, there’s a really good Substack I like. It’s once a month by Lynn Cherny. She goes through a lot of the developments in especially image-based AI stuff, which I think is the fastest developing field in this. I’d recommend that. To the news. Craig, you’ll be relieved to hear that MoviePass is risen from the grave. It’s now in a beta form. Craig: Thank God. John: People can sign up for it. I already signed you up for it. Craig: It must be free. John: It must be free. It’s going to be good. We’ll use that great Scriptnotes money to support MoviePass, which is a subject of basically continuous derision from the first moment we were aware of MoviePass. Craig: When we first encountered the concept of MoviePass, I believe the two of us were just generally incredulous. We didn’t understand in our simple cavemen minds how this made any financial sense. As it turned out, it didn’t. John: Scale alone will not get you to success. They burned about a quarter of a billion dollars on trying to do something. Craig: Oh, good. John: A lot of our listeners got to see free movies, so that’s awesome. That’s good. I’m going to put a link in the show notes to a piece that Alex Kirshner did for Slate about why this new version may not ignite so much money on fire but doesn’t really seem to have a workable flow either. Craig: That should be their slogan, “Won’t necessarily ignite as much money on fire.” Oh, MoviePass, I am laughing at you, not with you. John: We’ll continue to follow the saga of MoviePass, whatever it becomes. We just needed to mark this on the long timeline of MoviePass’s existence, which apparently it predated the version even we knew of it, because there was a version beforehand which wasn’t about giving you free movie tickets. It was just a movie loyalty program. It wasn’t originally so incredibly- Craig: Stupid. John: … stupid and generous. Craig: The new MoviePass, I’m trying to find details as to how this is going to be different than the prior one. John: It’s all a little vague. There’s talk of NFTs. Craig: Oh, good lord. Oh my god. John: Yeah, there’s ways to show your- Craig: I’ve heard enough. John: There’s definitely different price points. Sometimes you won’t be able to see a movie in its first week with this pass, but you would be able to see it on a subsequent week. Craig: Basically, anything that MoviePass does by definition has to be a worse deal for consumers than what it used to offer. That’s a tough way to roll out 2.0. John: It is a tough, tough way to roll out 2.0 but a very good segue into our discussion of Netflix, because Netflix is a company that pivoted constantly. Netflix was not at all the company that it is today. Craig: Not at all. John: I was reading through this piece that was on Netflix’s turning 25. I didn’t realize my first memory of Netflix was the red envelopes. Craig: Of course. John: You know there was a Netflix before red envelopes? Craig: What? John: What? Netflix was originally a place that sold you DVDs. They were literally a website where you could buy DVDs and have them shipped to your house. It was only after time they realized, “We have these giant warehouses full of DVDs. Wouldn’t it be better if the warehouse was essentially people’s living rooms?” You could just be constantly sending stuff in and out, and you could make money on a subscription service, rather than selling individual DVDs. That was the first pivot to subscriptions. It originally was a sales place. Craig: That makes sense. I remember hearing about the concept of what became I guess the more popularized version of Netflix, where you had a subscription and you could just get as many DVDs as you want. Really, the key was just send them back so you can get more. People like Megana… It sounds accusational, and it is. People like Megana have no idea what it means to rent a movie that you didn’t even want to watch but your girlfriend did, and then you watch it, and then you forget you had it for two extra days, and Blockbuster basically forces you to take a mortgage out on your house. It was terrible. It was terrible. John: Very true. You cannot think of that Netflix model without remembering Blockbuster and how much worse it was beforehand. Tying back into MoviePass, what MoviePass was trying to do was kind of what Netflix was doing back in the day. They were selling subscriptions they hoped you would not use. Netflix was hoping that most people might do one or two movies a month, and so therefore they were making money off those customers. It was customers who were like the Ryan Johnsons of the world who were watching two movies a night that were costing them money. It was a cool business. It was a great business. They recognized, “Oh, streaming’s going to happen, and we’re going to get out of this business, that’s great for us, and move to streaming on demand.” Wow, they made a good choice. Craig: Sometimes you move to a new space and you say, “You know what?” McDonald’s for the longest time sold hamburgers and the occasional fish sandwich. You know why they came up with the fish sandwich, don’t you? John: For Friday for Catholics. Craig: Exactly. They did that for Catholic folks, but mostly they were hamburgers. Then one day they were like, “What if we sold chicken in the form of nuggets?” which at the time was kind of a crazy move. John: It was. Craig: They moved into the chicken space, and they crushed it, but there was a preexisting chicken space. When Netflix moved into the streaming space, it was pretty nascent. Really what happened was they just defined it for themselves. They turned it into what it is now. You have to give Netflix and Reed Hastings and all of the management especially at that time an enormous amount of credit. There was this crazy moment, I don’t know if you remember, where they were going to split it into two things. This stock cratered, and the market went nuts. They were like, “Okay, sorry, we won’t do that. Everything’s together again.” They survived that, because for a bit it seemed like they wouldn’t. Then they just defined what streaming is. It’s pretty remarkable. John: I think you’re describing Qwikster was the- Craig: Oh god, was that what they called it? John: … attempt to spin off the… Craig: That was back when everything was a blankster. I guess Napster was the original blankster. John: I remember having a conversation with my TV agent at the time about doing something for Netflix. I think it was before it had launched even. I had a phone call. I was in New York for some reason. I was in New York for some reason. I had a phone call with them about this project they wanted to do, which was a Wizard of Ozzy kind of thing. It sounded cool, but I don’t even know where… Are people going to watch this on their computers? It didn’t really make sense to me what they were trying to do. It took a while. Without House of Cards, I don’t know that they would’ve been able to so quickly cross into mainstream acceptance. You have a prestigious show that people wanted to watch. People would pay money to subscribe. It got critical acclaim enough that it was part of the conversation. Craig: That was their big initial foray into creating content. Every now and then we hear about places that are creating content, and sometimes our first reaction is to snicker. IMDb is creating content. Maybe your first reaction is to snicker, but see where it goes. Now the people that offer brand new platforms for new kinds of media, that I think is still snicker-worthy. Anybody that wasn’t snickering at Quibi was delusional. Anybody can make content if they have the money. Netflix proved it. Then they got to where they are now, which is at another, I believe, crossroads. Seems like they’re having to figure out where they go next. They appear to have maxed out in subscriptions. They need to maybe find ways to run ads. I don’t know. John: They may want to break away from what they’ve been doing in terms of dropping whole seasons at once, which you and I both talked about, which I think makes a tremendous amount of sense. It seems like just stubbornness at this point that they’re not. Craig: It’s stubbornness. It is. As somebody that makes things, the thing that I always was the most nervous about when considering like, “What if I went over to Netflix and pitched this or that?” was the notion that everything would just be like blech, because it’s just not the same. You can just see how much a week-to-week release helps things, particularly if you happen to have, say, a show on HBO. You can just feel it. It’s just a thing. I got to believe they’re going to change that. They really need to. John: I would not be surprised if they do. Let’s talk about HBO in follow-up. We previously talked about our confusion over how we could possibly be saving HBO Max money to just drop a bunch of those old shows. I’ll put a link in the show notes to an article by Cynthia Littleton writing for Variety. She digs a little bit more into the numbers around that. We talked about residuals. Residuals wouldn’t be a huge thing. Music licensing was a thing she brought up which I think we had skipped over, which could be a [inaudible 00:15:57] factor. Craig: That’s a thing. John: They may have ongoing music license, not just for episodes, but for whole series. In some cases, dropping those out may be helpful and useful for them, even if it’s $10,000 for an episode or $50,000 for a series. You add enough of those series up together, and if literally no one is watching them, it can make some sense to take them off the service. That doesn’t make sense to me why you bury something that you’ve already animated a whole new season for. That is wild to me. Craig: That is wild. I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to those things. Per this article, they are saying that at least in some cases they had yanked shows that had episodes that had racked up zero views in a 12-month period. They’re a business. I get it. John: There is some cost. There’s an opportunity cost to how you’re setting things up. There’s some server costs. They’re not huge. Craig: Clearly, there are no server costs for that one, because [inaudible 00:16:55]. I think what she’s saying is that there are certain fees that are triggered if the material is available. Again, I can’t imagine something. There’s got to be additional tax baloney going on here. John: I’m sure [inaudible 00:17:10]. Craig: It’s so far beyond my ability to understand. No, you know what? It’s not. It’s far beyond my interest to understand. John: There we go. Craig: It’s an important distinction. I could absolutely- John: You could do it. You just don’t want to. Craig: Of course, yeah. I’m smart. I could figure it out. Just don’t want to. John: We have some more follow-up on brocal fry. Megana Rao, could you help us out with this? Megana Rao: Aaron wrote in and said, “As a mid-40s dude with a late-developing brocal fry, it is my non-scientific opinion that a lot of guys in business developed this after Obama became president in an effort to sound more thoughtful and erudite. For most of us, it doesn’t sound that way, but I believe I subconsciously absorbed the thoughtful hesitation that Obama used while forming his thoughts. To me it was a crutch to stop saying, “Um, like, you know,” in business presentations.” John: I like that as a way of holding the floor and holding space is a vocal affectation that makes it clear that you are still present in the conversation. You have not yielded. You’re going to get your next thought out there eventually. Craig: I’m not sure that replacing one crutch with another crutch is going to be much help. The reason that “um, like, you know,” is problematic is because it’s space that you are holding but not delivering anything in. People in a room ultimately want content. They want to hear what you have to say, but they don’t want to wait for it any longer than they would normally need to. If you are going, “Uh, so, uh,” you’re also being boring. Yes, Obama, had a certain vocal pattern, but he wasn’t a slow speaker. He would occasionally just do that little pause, but it was quite brief. I would say, Aaron, while you may be correct in your analysis, I would say that if you had an instinct to try and get rid of “um, like, you know,” I would apply that same instinct to “uh.” John: We’re just going to let you do that. It’s going to be the sound effects for this episode. Craig: I’m sort of like Butthead at this point. Uhh. John: More follow-up. Declan from Canberra, Australia wrote in to point out that David F. Sandberg, the Swedish director behind Lights Out, Annabelle: Creation, and Shazam, got his Hollywood career after his Lights Out short went viral. He still makes great little horror shorts on his YouTube channel. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that. It’s Sandberg Animation. Craig: That’s nice. John: It’s great. They’re super low budget. He’s usually filming in his house with his wife. Craig: Do you know why they’re super low budget? Because there’s no market for these things. We’re just going to keep saying it. I like that people keep trying to storm our castle. I feel like with every attack, our walls just get thicker and better. John: You know what else is also there’s no market for but we still enjoy, are the Three Pages that our listeners write in with. We’re going to do a Three Page Challenge. For people who are brand new to the podcast, every once in a while we do a Three Page Challenge, where we invite our listeners to send through three pages of a script. It could be a feature. It could be a series. We take a look at these pages, give our honest feedback. We’ll put a link in the show notes so you can download these pages yourself and read along with us to see what we’re talking about. I reminded everybody these are completely voluntary. They’ve asked for this feedback. We are not being mean on the internet. We are trying to be helpful and supportive on the internet. Craig: Correct. We do our best. John: Megana, you read 180 submissions for this week. Craig: Good god, Megana. John: Thank you for doing that. Craig: Thank you. Megana: You’re welcome. I normally get to about 100, but I read more than that this week. Craig: You just felt like abusing yourself. Megana: Yeah, absolutely. Craig: You had some sort of shame going on and needed to hurt. John: Megana’s also home in Ohio, so maybe she was just ducking away and reading a few extra. Craig: The extra 80 were just getting away from your parents. Megana: Yeah, it was like, “Sorry, I absolutely have to do this.” John: “John and Craig have so much work for me this week.” Any patterns you’ve noticed in this batch of submissions? Megana: Yes. One thing that really… I don’t know if maybe this has always been a thing but I just stumbled upon it this time, but a lot of unnecessary adverbs. John: Do you think that was prompted because you and I discussed a couple weeks ago about this writerly advice about adverbs? You actually got me a book for my birthday which was all about adverbs and the writer’s advice not to use adverbs. Do you think you were cued up because of that? Megana: Yeah, 100%. Now that you say it, I’m like, that’s exactly where it came from. Craig: I like that Megana has no defensiveness. None. She’s just like, “Oh, I am guilty.” Megana: It’s not even worth arguing. John’s like Professor X. He just knows me too well at this point. Craig: He just went right into that. He got in there. The adverbs are often unnecessary. John: That’s an adverb. Craig: Correct. I think the adverbs that are the most useful are the ones that aren’t the L-Y adverbs. Those we tend to need, like when. A lot of the blanklies can be eliminated. Of course, we don’t believe in rules around these parts, so please don’t do that thing where you just hunt, do a find for L-Y and then go crazy and delete everything. It’s probably unnecessary. John: Craig, would you say our general advice is if you find yourself using an L-Y adverb, always ask yourself, do I really need it, because many cases you will not. If you really do need it, keep it. Great. Craig: Yeah, I think so. Probably worth the interrogation if people are telling you you use a lot of them. If no one’s complaining, you probably are using a decent amount. The other bit of advice that I recall is Christopher McQuarrie, the way he put it was, I think he said, “Every time I use an exclamation point in a screenplay, it’s some kind of failure.” I think that’s very true. Be careful about exclamation points. Just force yourself to rationalize them. If it’s rationalized, absolutely use it. John: This last script I did have at least one, maybe two double exclamation moments, but they were those moments where I was deliberately going over the top to get your attention. Craig: As long as you’re mindful of them, I think that’s the key. John: Any other patterns, Megana, you noticed? Craig: Yes. I also noticed there were a lot of really dense first pages. I wasn’t seeing dialog until the beginning or maybe the middle of Page 2, which again, not a hard and fast rule, but it’s nice to have some entry point into your script earlier on. Craig: I do think that if you have a first page that is dialog-free, which is a perfectly reasonable creative choice, it’s all the more important to make sure there’s lots of white space, because a whole page with no dialog… Readers tend to skim towards the dialog. We know this. When there’s no dialog there, they may feel like, “Oh no, I have to do a lot of swimming.” Just give them lots of islands to land on and take a breath before they swim again into the next paragraph. John: Very true. Megana: Then the third thing that I noticed a lot were confusing reveals, like a lot of man’s voiceover and then revealing who the man is later. Craig: Unnecessary. Megana: I just felt like they could’ve introduced that person earlier, and it would’ve been much cleaner. Craig: Always a tough choice. John: I see that a lot. Craig: Why don’t we dig in and see what we got with these fine people? John: Absolutely. Again, if you want to read along these pages, just click through the show notes, and you can maybe read ahead before we get into this analysis. In case you’re driving your car and just want to hear a summary of what this first script is, Megana, can you help us out with Oculum by Larry Bambrick? Megana: On the preface/epigraph page, there’s a note that in the future, a virus has killed most of the human population and black rains have destroyed crops and technology. The only hope for survivors is Oculum. Then in the three pages, we open on the seed park in Oculum. A petal floats down into a grove of peach trees. It’s an idyllic scene framed by clear blue skies, until a robot sentry zooms down from the sky and through the landscape, kicking up hundreds of petals. We cut to Miranda24, who examines a petal from her bedroom window. Miranda24 speaks to her mother about the weather, the peach trees, and Oculum. Through their dialog, we learn that it’s Miranda24’s birthday and that she’s the first of the Oculum children to turn 16. It’s also revealed that Mother is a robot with a porcelain painted face. Craig: Basically John August. John: Come now, I’m not a robot. I have firmly established I’m human here. Craig: That’s what the robots would say, “I am not a robot.” Of course. John: I’m not a robot. Craig: Of course that’s what you say. John: Looking at the title page here, there’s spacing in between the letters of the words Oculum. Common approach. Looks lovely. Go for it. It says “by: Larry Bambrick.” The standard form is “written by Larry Bambrick.” Just might as well be standard here. Craig: Didn’t bother me. John: It’s fine either way. On the, I’m going to call it the preface page, we’re getting a setup there like this is the science fiction utopia/dystopia that we’re in. It’s setting us up. Maybe that’s rolling past on a screen before the movie starts. Craig: All of this feels like it should be learned by the person watching rather than told to them. None of it seems like it wouldn’t be learned. You’re going to have to reveal this in interesting ways. This one, I wasn’t quite sure I felt the need for it. It seemed like it was short circuiting Larry’s chance to reveal these things to people. John: There are basically two scenes happening here. There’s a setup of this outdoor world. Then we’re in a scene with Miranda24 and the mother robot. Let’s start with this outdoor setting scene, because there’s a lot of painting happening here, and yet I got really confused about what I was supposed to be seeing through it. We got the lovely landscape, but once it comes time for the flash of light moving across the sky, that thing falling, but it seems impossible how it’s falling, I didn’t know what I was supposed to be taking out of that. Craig, do you have insights there? Craig: I was quite enjoying the way Larry was painting the picture. I felt like I was in a place. I felt like I could see things. There was lots of nice use of colors. I thought all capping PEACH TREES was quite nice. Where I stopped, and I think this is just literally a word choice issue, is he says, “A flash of light reflects off something moving across the sky. It’s small and silver. A plane?” Okay, maybe it’s a plane. Maybe it’s a rocket ship. Maybe it’s a meteor. I don’t know. What could it be? Then the next part. “And as we watch, it moves down…as if it’s somehow riding across the sky.” “Down” and “across” are italicized. John: I can’t see that. Craig: Now I’m like, wait a second. It already said it was moving across the sky. Now it moves down as if it’s somehow riding across the sky. It’s just saying “across” again as if you’re giving us new information. Also, I don’t know what that means. John: I couldn’t picture it. Craig: What does “riding across the sky” mean? Any guesses? I don’t know. John: I had a direction of movement in my head from the first line, and then I didn’t see it. Craig: Then he says then it plummets. Is it plummeting? Is it moving across the sky? I don’t know. I got confused there. I did like the way the scene ended, because surely there will be an explosion, but there’s nothing until, “A sentry (a sleek ROBOT, made of stainless steel, riding a single wheel) rockets past us along the ground — kicking up a trail of peach petals in its wake.” That’s a lovely image. I like the sense of mystery here. I thought there was good mystery. Other than the weird thing about riding across the sky, it felt pretty good. John: There’s a single line here, “What the hell is that?” directed to us as readers. That can be great. I don’t mind that, just like you’re talking to us as the reader, because that’s the experience we’d get in the theater. I just got confused with what I was supposed to be seeing in the paragraphs around it. We were almost there. Craig: Almost there but very encouraging. John: Then we get into the bedroom. Here is where we’ll talk about specifics that are on the page. I think this was the wrong scene, because I think what we’re trying to do here is establish some of the stuff that was happening in the open scroll credits there, what is this world that we’re in. It’s also supposed to be a scene introducing Miranda24 and her mother and the fact that she’s a robot and the conflict between the two of them. I left the scene only knowing the mother was a robot and having really no idea who Miranda24 was, which by the end of three pages, I should have some idea what her voice was, what she looks for, what she’s interested in. I wasn’t really getting that from this scene. Craig: It begins with Miranda24. Her name being Miranda24, you’re already in your science fiction space, she’s a clone, something like that. John: Craig, you and I as a reader know that her name is Miranda24, but the viewer doesn’t know that she’s Miranda24. Craig: No question. I don’t think Mother calls her Miranda24 either. You’re right. That’s facts not in evidence, essentially. Then it says, “16 years-old,” and then in parentheses, “(she is today in fact).” I think Larry’s saying it’s her birthday. That’s a weird way of putting it. Then it says, “She traces the petal with a finger.” She’s holding a peach petal. It was the stuff that we saw outside. She now is inside a house. If you’re going to say, “What the hell is that?” earlier, I think you would want to acknowledge, oddly, inside the house, acknowledge that that’s weird, because are there peach petals everywhere? Then Mother does this bit. I think there was some nice exposition in the sense of, Miranda, without even looking outside, says the weather’s perfect. I’ve learned that the weather is always perfect here. That’s quite nice. I think the reveal of Miranda’s mother as a robot is problematic as directed on the page. Here’s what it says. We see Miranda’s mother. It says “ANGLE ON: And we see,” which we don’t want to do. It would just be “ANGLE ON:” John: We don’t need the “ANGLE ON:” at all. That doesn’t do us [inaudible 00:31:23]. Craig: Either it’s “ANGLE ON: Miranda’s mother,” or “We see Miranda’s mother standing in the doorway. The morning light hasn’t quite reached this far, so we can’t identify much about her. Simple clothes. Upright posture.” No, that’s not how light works. Either I can see that she’s a robot or I can’t. If you don’t want me to see that she’s a robot, she’s in darkness, because once you reveal her, she is definitely a robot. John: Yeah, or I can imagine there’s some sort of silhouettey kind of version where we can’t make out her face, but we can see that there’s a person standing there. She’s not really standing, because we’re learning that she’s going to wheel up. I think we need to be a little more careful planning that. Craig: Her neck is gears and wires. We can’t quite do that. Then there’s a very stilted conversation between a 16-year-old girl and her robot mother. I don’t know how you feel about these things, John and Megana. For me, when I’m in science fiction scripts and I get overloaded with what I consider to be fairly tropey scientific jargon, my eyelids get heavy. Just the name Oculum alone is science fiction jargony. John: “Regulus will be disappointed.” Craig: “Regulus will be disappointed.” “Oculum protects us.” “Regulus will be disappointed.” “The trees are blooming in the Seed Park.” It’s too much. It’s too much. I’m starting to giggle a little bit, and I don’t want to. Certainly, Larry doesn’t want us giggling. I think there’s just too much of that kind of stuff that makes it feel a bit fusty and derivative of just iffy novels. Then just a pronouncement from robot mother, “You’re turning sixteen. A milestone.” I agree with you, John. I think that this scene was not giving me what I wanted, because I just don’t know anything about anything. I need something else. If I had her walking home, if I had her seeing the robot go by, if I had her, I don’t know, doing something interesting- John: If I had her trying to conceal something from the robot mother, that would be great, like she’s trying to hide this peach petal from Mother, just so we have some point of intersection there. Then let the conversation be less science fictiony and just more practical could be great. I’ll direct our listeners to an Australian movie from a couple years ago called Mother, which I quite enjoyed. I think it was a Netflix original which is about a young girl raised by a robot, largely the same kind of premise with very different color palette feelings. Craig: Isn’t that Raised By Wolves? Isn’t that the same thing? John: Raised By Wolves is a similar premise as well. This is different. This one is an underground bunker situation. Craig: Got it. John: All of these things are existing within a set of tropes. If Larry’s going to try to do the story, he’s going to be aware of those who look for ways to not make us feel like we’re going to be trope city in those first three pages. Craig: I would say that a good trope, carefully used, can be wonderful, because ultimately if you go to, what is it, trope.com or tvtropes.com, literally every single thing at this point they’ve come up with a name for as a trope. Everything, no matter what you watch, no matter how good it is, it’s full of tropes. That’s not what we mean. What we mean is just stuff that feels overly familiar in a way that makes you seem less creative. In this case, there’s just a certain… The idea of a human talking to a tut-tutting but somewhat stiff robot mother does feel a little done. It’s a tough one to pull off without the robot mother feeling like a new kind of robot mother. The thing is, in a good way, Larry writes well. The pages lay out beautifully. I can see everything. I think it’s really well done in that regard. It’s just the content itself feels slightly shopworn. Perhaps it just needs to be presented in a more fresh way. John: Agreed. Let’s take a look at the log line that Larry sent through. It reads, “In the apocalyptic future, 16-year-old Miranda24 learns that everything she’s been told about her perfect life inside a domed world, the Oculum, is a lie. She’ll discover that it’s up to her and a small band of other teenagers she meets to bring hope to a devastated land.” Craig: There you go. That’s a YA novel. John: It’s a YA novel. Craig: Which is fine, except that it feels like it’s been pulled from a million Maze Runners, like if you run Maze Runner through Dall-E. It just feels really familiar. John: Agreed. Let’s go on to a script which did not feel familiar to me at all. This is We’re All Very Tired by Marissa Gawel. Megana, can you help us out? Megana: Gabriel Bolan, 70s, walks through a city park at night in Romania. When no one’s looking, he digs a small hole and plants a few seeds in the ground. We cut to a summer camp in rural Oregon, where Meredith Perez, 30s, welcomes a group of people off of a school bus to, quote, “mushroom camp.” Brenda Cho, 30s, one of the new arrivals, says she thought it was more of a class. We then cut to Brenda walking two whiny toddlers around in Kansas City, where Brenda takes a picture of a flier for a mushroom camp on a telephone pole. We cut back to the camp cafeteria, where Gabriel discusses matsutake mushrooms with the other campers. Craig: This whole trope of the mushroom camp. John: It’s all about mushroom camp. A thing I will say about these three pages is I never knew what was coming next. Craig: Yes, that is true. John: Because the scenes just didn’t flow together in a way that was helpful at all. You could’ve shuffled those in any order, and it would’ve gotten the same amount out of them. One of the scenes I really liked, I really like Brenda with her kids. I thought the voices in that were actually just great. In that three pages, I have no idea what movie this is. Craig: No, this was very confusing. First things first, we open with a flashback. You can’t really open with a flashback, because what are you flashing back from. The way flashbacks work is you see… Chernobyl opens with a scene that then is later, and then you flash back to whatever. You have to give some sort of orientation to people, like what is the date, what is the year. We can’t put the word flashback on the screen. John: Instead of flashback, I would say 1994 or just give a year. Craig: Give a year and put it on the screen. Here’s a guy who’s in his 70s, and he’s planting something. What he does is he digs a little hole, plants a few seeds, and then pours some water on them. Then we’re out of there. Now that’s not enough. John: It’s not. I didn’t know what I was supposed to take from that. I didn’t know, because he’s trying to do it secretly, but there wasn’t enough there. Craig: No. When these moments happen in their own little timeline, there has to be some sort of drama to them of some kind. This is just planting something. Then we meet Meredith Perez. We don’t know the difference. We don’t know how we would know that this is present day as opposed to a flashback. We also don’t know how long ago the flashback was. She walks out and approaches a group of people getting off a school bus. I don’t understand what… Is she high? Was that the idea? Was she meant to be high? She seems high. John: I took her as being nervous. I actually like her ability to continually undercut herself. She keeps trying things and undercutting what she was doing before. That can work, but there was not other engine to the scene. It was just her sputtering. I didn’t get what the point of the scene was supposed to be. Craig: For instance, John, you’re absolutely right, if I knew that this was the opening day of mushroom camp and she has never welcomed people before to mushroom camp, this would work. We’re going to presume that the person who greets the people coming off the bus has done this many, many, many times. Think of the employees at the White Lotus greeting the people coming off the boat. John: Exactly. Craig: This is a well-practiced bit of theater. She just seemed so discombobulated. Then Brenda says, “I thought this was more of a class.” What does Brenda know about anything anyway? She just walked off a bus. John: We’re going to learn what Brenda knows, because she just took a photo of a thing called mushroom camp in the next scene. These are all in really a very strange order. It’s like we have all the flashbacks before the plane crashes in Lost. It’s just a strange thing. I do want to talk about… I thought Brenda with her two kids, her two toddlers, I thought the voices were actually very authentic in the way that moms speak to their kids like, “No, we’re doing this. We like walking.” Basically, you speak in this weird first-person plural involving your kids and their unreasonable demands for things. I like that, but I wanted that attached to something, because right now it’s just floating out there in a space. Craig: Be aware that shooting scenes with toddlers is incredibly hard. It’s nice that you wrote dialog for toddlers, but there’s a reason you rarely see them doing dialog, because you can’t rely on them doing dialog. Also, what’s going on here is Brenda is going to see this flyer on the telephone pole that says, “Make your own income. Become a morel mushroom hunter.” What you’re showing me, Marissa, is a woman who is overwhelmed by her kids, but what you’re not showing me is a woman who’s short on money. What is motivating her here is that she needs money. Now if these kids were overacting and she was begging on the phone, begging a caregiver to please not quit, but she can’t pay her more, because she doesn’t have enough money, and then the lady hangs up on her while she’s doing the shoo and all the rest, and then she sees it, maybe I’ll go, “Okay, she needs money. That’s what this is about.” John: Is Brenda a babysitter? Craig: No, I think Brenda’s a mom. John: Do we know that she’s the mom? Craig: No, we don’t, but I’m going to presume she is. John: I guess we would presume that she’s a mother unless we hear otherwise, but actually, in some ways it makes more sense. Craig: She’s late 30s. She’s pushing a stroller with two kids. I think she’s the mom. If she’s not the mom, then help. Help me. John: Help me out. Craig: Help me out. Then it would be good to know that she’s the nanny and that she wants a new job that pays more or that doesn’t have kids screaming. Here’s where I really got confused. We go back to present day and we don’t know. We’re now in a large cafeteria. Describe the cafeteria, by the way. Where is this cafeteria, in the middle of the woods? At one table, Gabriel, the guy who was in his 70s from the flashback, is using “his fork to slice off a piece of mushroom. He takes a bite and is pleasantly surprised.” How old is he now? John: I have no idea. More than 70. Craig: Is he 90? I’m so confused. He says, “This is matsutake.” Then the guy across from him is like, “What? Huh?” His name is Rah Reddy, “20s, skeptical.” What is he doing in mushroom camp? If someone’s like, “Oh, matsutake,” and he’s like, “What? All right,” how did he end up here? He must’ve made a choice to go to mushroom camp, right? John: People get off the bus. I have a hard time believing that the first scene that we’re going to really see them or get to know them at is going to be inside this cafeteria. I just feel like there were some scenes missing in between there. These people talk on the bus. It was a strange way to get us into meeting this group. Craig: Very. John: Again, I don’t know what this movie actually is at the end of three pages, which is a problem. I’m assuming it’s an ensemble movie, that it’s not strict POV to any one person, because it felt like we would’ve had two scenes with a person if it was going to be their POV. Craig: I’m going to guess that this involves vampires. That’s what I’m going to guess. I’m going to guess that Gabriel is not just a mushroom hunter, he’s a vampire hunter. He’s from Romania. Rah says, “Ha, vampires!” and Gabriel chuckles. “And inspiring mountains.” Feels like maybe there’s going to be some sort of summer camp horror movie thing going on that involves mushrooms somehow, which I’m saying as a guy that’s making a show that is not unrelated to mushrooms. I think you put your finger on the problem. We need time to meet people before stuff happens. I need to know what he’s doing there. I need to know why I needed to see that thing in the beginning. Yes, we need to see people on the bus first talking to each other and grilling each other on why they’re doing something as bizarre as going to mushroom camp. Then I need a tour. Give me a tour. Orient me, something. Open the envelope. John: I can open the envelope and tell you that I don’t think there’s vampires in here. Craig: Oh, dammit. John: The log line that person sent says, “A small retreat in Oregon promises its visitor a restful break from the demands of capitalistic society, but it soon becomes clear that the retreat’s talk of experimenting with medicinal properties of mushrooms has dark underpinnings.” Craig: There’s something. John: I guess there could still be vampires technically, but I think it’s much less likely. Craig: Yeah, so some sort of zombie-ing or… I don’t know. Odd that this is about a break from the demands of capitalistic society but the advertising is promising you money. That may be part of the irony. I don’t know. I just think that basically, Marissa, you have an idea that no one else has. I assure you that there are no other mushroom camp movies. You need to orient us and be really careful about how you present moves in time, especially when you have three within three pages. John: A lot. Craig: That is telling people they’re in for a lot of whiplash. John: Agreed. Let’s do our final Three Page Challenge, this one by Jordan Johnson. Help us out, Megana. Megana: Maddy, 24, discusses death in voiceover as she speaks about different religions’ conceptions of death and parts of life. We see the corresponding images flash by on a projector until she gets to a picture of Olivia Carter, 24. Maddy reveals that Olivia was her best friend and that she killed herself three days ago. We then cut to Maddy cooking potato salad in the church kitchen. Evelyn, Olivia’s mom, expresses her gratitude for Maddy and takes her hands, asking Maddy to join her in prayer. John: We should also stress that that voiceover continues beyond this point. She’s a character who can voiceover at any point during the story. She has voiceover power. Craig: She has voiceover power, exactly. I guess the first thing that we notice when we look at the title page is it’s very graphic. John: It’s really nice. Describe for our listeners driving their car someplace, describe this title page for us. Craig: I don’t know if Jordan is a man or a woman. Jordan has created a very beautiful graphic title page that mimics what a title page of a program at a funeral or wake would look like. It’s got four crosses with lots of little beams in each corner and a little border around it, as it would. The title, Wake, is in this nice little scripty font, little swooshities underneath. Then instead of saying “written by Jordan Johnson,” it says “Funeral Arrangements by Jordan Johnson.” Then underneath that, in italics, it says, “The family of Olivia Carter sincerely appreciates your thoughts, prayers, and condolences.” This is very clever. John: It is. Craig: I would go right for this if I saw this in a pile. John: I think it’s really smartly done. Craig: Really well done. John: That typeface is Zap Chancery. Craig: Of course. John: It was put on the first LaserWriter 2 printer, which it became ubiquitous and people used it for all the wrong things. This is actually an example. Craig: Like funerals? John: Funerals is fine for that, but people will try to use it for newsletters and [inaudible 00:46:30]. Craig: Please don’t do that. John: I was really struck by the title page. Great. Really well done. This opening narration thing I think largely works, since this is Maddy. It’s her voiceover. “See this? This is what you get when you die… I guess if you’re Buddhist you’ll see this.” Craig: Over that, it’s nothing. You see nothing, which is great. No, I’m sorry, you do see something. Sorry. John: My biggest note here is I think you need to move these scene descriptions above the dialog in all of these cases. Then it actually makes much more sense. Craig: That would make more sense. This is a very simple thing where you hear in voiceover Maddy’s brief announcement. This is what you would see if you’re a Buddhist when you die. This is what you see when you’re a Christian. This is what you see when you’re a Muslim, Hindu, or Jewish. All those things are very simple kind of projector images. Then she basically transitions to, I don’t know what you do see when you die, but I know what you will stop seeing, essentially. Then she gives a very interesting list of things. John: Ending with eye-light. What did you take eye-light to mean, on Page 2? Craig: That one was odd. I think it means just that there was light shining in her eyes. I don’t know what… Megana, are we running into a generational problem? Megana: No, I also did not totally know what eye-light meant. I thought it meant the feeling of closing your eyes and having the sun shining on them. Craig: It says, “We are on Liv’s face, showing bright and happy eyes.” I think what Jordan was intending was light in your eyes. When we’re shooting things, eye-lights, we do use those to put out little sparkles in your eye. That one was a little odd. What was lovely was I thought the progression of things that you don’t see anymore, this is what Jordan gave us. “No more sunrises. Or crepes. Or dimples.” That’s where we meet Liv for the first time and see her face. “No more sounds of a pin dropping on vinyl. Or watching thunderstorms in the Spring. Or eye-light.” Then the eye-light brings us back to Liv’s picture, and says, “This is Liv. She’s my best friend. She killed herself 3 days ago. No more eggnog or Autumn or thrift stores.” That was kind of awesome, I thought. There are so many different ways of delivering what can often be a gloppy thing, which is somebody killed themself. You can get very melodramatic about it. I thought this was a very creative way in, that’s connecting Liv’s fate to a larger discussion about death and the afterlife, and also then tells me so much about Maddy, which is she doesn’t pause. She just rolls into this interesting, hyper-verbal way of describing things. John: The next scene, which takes us to the end of the three pages, is in this church kitchen. “Maddy stirs the potato salad, adding in spices and whatever other gross things go into potato salad.” Craig: Great. It’s disgusting. John: It’s the right tone for it. It’s important I think when you have a centerpiece character like Maddy who is cynical. Having some tone being carried through into the scene description so helps. It makes it feel like the author and the central character are the same person. Craig: I wish that we had just a little bit of a physical description of Maddy. John: Agreed. Craig: Other than her age, I don’t know anything about her, her hair, her clothes, her makeup, as is my want. There is mention further down the page of a woman named Pamela, who is working on a fruit salad at the other end of the kitchen. I think we would probably want to introduce her here earlier before Evelyn comes in, because when Evelyn enters, that’s when a new thing shifts. We don’t want to start meeting people that had already been there at that point. John: I agree. The description of the kitchen is nice. It’s talking about the “yellow hue of an old church kitchen.” It says “cold LED tube lighting panels.” They’re actually fluorescent lighting panels. Those panels wouldn’t be LED, just fluorescent [inaudible 00:50:31] going for. Craig: They sure would not. Jordan’s younger. John: Jordan’s younger, I think. Craig: I have no problem with that. John: No, that’s absolutely fine. I like most of the scene that happens after this time. I thought it could be tighter and shorter. I think we could’ve gotten to the point of it a little bit quicker. I enjoy what Jordan’s doing on the page here. The choice to make all of Maddy’s voiceovers in bold is really smart, because even though there’s the little V.O. at the end, it can be confusing when characters are saying things in scenes and have voiceover power. Bolding those lines really helps. Craig: Agreed, and agreed. I was really happy to see that. It helped me so much. This is why we say there are no rules. The rule is help me as the reader. I’m sure that a million screenwriting teachers will tell you you should not suddenly bold a character’s name in the middle of a script, but yeah, you should if it helps. In this case, it helped. I agree with you that Evelyn’s prayer could’ve been trimmed down. In editing, I know exactly what I would’ve trimmed it. The information we need is that Evelyn, she’s religious, whereas Maddy, not so much, and that she was Olivia’s mom. “Please bless the preparation of this food and the nourishment it will bring to our bodies. Please keep us all in your care today as we mourn the death of my sweet, sweet Olivia Michelle. Amen.” That’s all you need. The next chunk, you don’t need. I loved Maddy’s commentary after Evelyn says to her, “You were a good friend to her, Maddy.” We hear Maddy’s thought in voiceover, which I think was great. Generally speaking, I loved it. I just loved these pages. I thought they were really well written. The scenes moved. I saw everything. I know so much about Maddy without anybody telling me anything about Maddy. I know so much about Liv and Maddy without anybody telling me. John: Absolutely. Craig: The creativity that led for this front page to be so interesting I think carried through. Well done, Jordan Johnson. John: One other suggestion for how you can save some space on the page. On the top of Page 3, Evelyn has two lines. She goes, “Thank you for helping. I don’t know what I would’ve done without you.” Then there’s two lines of scene description before we get to another Evelyn line, “Let me say a quick word over the food. I don’t know what I would’ve done without you two.” Parentheticals, takes their hands. “Let me say a quick a quick word over the food.” That gives you all you needed to do between those two lines, and it saves you some space on the page. Craig: If you wanted to get across that Maddy was not even looking at Evelyn but just stays looking at the potato salad, you can say, “Maddy, her eyes focused on the potato salad, joins Pam and Evelyn as they hold hands.” Then Evelyn says, “Dear Lord.” There is a way to be a little bit more compressed there. If you’re not running into page issues, I’d rather the space, personally. You’re right, if you are, you need to squeeze some juice out of this. You’ll squeeze way more juice out of it by making the prayer shorter, which you can definitely do. John: That way you won’t have to fluid morph in the cut. Craig: Fluid morph. John: Let’s take a look at the log line. “At the funeral of her best friend, brash and honest 24-year-old Maddy Palmer endures the suffocating etiquette of a traditional wake.” Craig: That’s pretty much what we were getting there. John: It’s interesting that it looks like the whole movie’s maybe at this wake, rather than going on past it. Not what I would’ve expected, but I’m curious what’s going to happen. I would read more pages, so that’s a good sign. Craig: Wakes are notorious for going off the rails, because they are not like the stuffy funeral services. They’re meant to be more of a party and celebration, I guess. I’ve never been to a wake. Drinking is involved, as I recall. John: It can be. I want to thank certainly our three people who submitted these pages, because they were so brave for us to talk through them, but the other 180 people who submitted their pages, because they could’ve been chosen as well. If you have your own pages that you want us to take a look at, you don’t mail them to Megana. Instead, you fill out a form. Go to johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. There’s a little form. You click some buttons. You attach your pdf. We could be talking about this on the next round of Three Page Challenges. Craig: Absolutely. Megana, thank you for again the extraordinary self-abuse. Megana: Of course. It’s my pleasure. Craig: Make sure you enjoy in self-care. John: Let’s answer one incredibly quick question that I know we actually have the answer to. Craig: Great. John: Matthew asks, “Hey, so in the new movie Watcher, I saw a credit I’ve never seen before. I Googled it, and I found nothing. It said ‘based on a screenplay by.'” Craig: I feel like we answer this every day. John: “What’s that about?” We did, but we’ll answer on this podcast as well. Craig: “Based on a screenplay by” is a source material credit, the way that “based on a novel” or “based on a play” or “based on a song” is. What it means is that a screenplay was written early in the development of the project, oftentimes beginning the development of the project. That screenplay was not under the auspices of WGA contract. Why? Because it was written for a nonsignatory, or, as is more often the case, it was written for a nonsignatory but overseas. A lot of projects that originate in the UK for instance are not Writers Guild covered. They are rather written in the UK, where Writers Guild doesn’t have jurisdiction. Then it gets either brought into another company, another company buys that thing from the first company, or, again more likely, the people developing it say, “Oh, we want to hire John August to rewrite this.” John only works under WGA contract, so now, lo and behold, boop, WGA contract. WGA credits, “written by,” “screenplay by,” “screen story by,” “story by,” all of those are a result of our collective bargaining agreement. They are available only to people that work under the Writers Guild collective bargaining agreement and not to anyone else. “Based on a screenplay by” means the first or early screenplay was not covered by the WGA. John: Exactly. It could be that this screenplay was 40 years old but overseas. If it was written under WGA contract, even for Warners back in the day, it would still be part of this [inaudible 00:56:35] title. Craig: Yes. We will answer this question many, many more times. John: Many, many more times. Time for our One Cool Things. Craig: Yay. John: My One Cool Thing is a book. It is The Secret History of Mac Gaming by Richard Moss. Craig, it’s a book I think you’ll enjoy. Craig: Looking at the website. John: It’s 480 pages long. It’s a big, thick, yellow book, comes out of the UK. It’s not new. I think it was first published in 2017, but this updated version has new more good stuff in it, or more new good old stuff in it. I had my Macintosh quite early on. I played a lot of games on Macintosh. Reading this book, I’m just remembering how different everything was, because this is pre-internet. To get a game, you had to have somebody give you that game on a disk. [inaudible 00:57:16] users group or find a shareware. Basically, college campuses were all about trading games back and forth. There are many great titles I remember from back in these days. Dark Castle, fantastic. Craig: Of course. You would also get some quasi-free games if you subscribed to Macworld. John: Macworld, MacUser, both. Craig: There would be a floppy disk actually in the magazine that you could pop out. There were also some, literally just retype the code. People would just list code for stuff that you’d type in. John: I don’t remember that for Macintosh stuff, but my initial Atari- Craig: Apple II or something like that. John: Yeah, Apple II, there were little games you could type in from the magazine. This was after that. The Macintosh was never really designed to be a gaming machine, and yet the people who would love to play games also loved the Macintosh. It was just a very natural fit. Craig: Yes, it was, until at some point suddenly no one was making games for Mac at all, and it was all PC. John: One company would be the one who would port all the big PC titles over to Macintosh, and they would come a year later, and they wouldn’t have the things you would want to see. Craig: It wouldn’t be as good. John: Then eventually, most stuff moved to being… Either you had a gaming PC that was literally a PC or you had a console that could just do so many things that you would never want your home computer to do. Craig: Still to this day, if you’re playing off console, it’s almost certainly a PC, because there are PC rigs that are just built specifically for gaming. That’s great. John: Anyway, this was a nice trip down memory lane. I don’t know how interesting this will be for people who didn’t have any of that firsthand history, because it would be like me reading about old rotary telephones or something. I don’t have that experience. Craig: I do have the experience. John: I do, but I- Craig: I just don’t care. John: I don’t care. Craig: This is more nostalgia than anything else. This definitely feels like one of those nostalgia books. John: The D and D book that you and I both loved, the Art and Arcana book, it’s like that but for Mac games. Craig: Brought to us by my pal Kyle Newman. I have two Cool Things this week, both related to puzzles. The first is Ryan O’Shea, who was the first and only entry into my solve the Kevin Wald cryptic contest, challenge. By cryptic, I mean cryptics, multiple puzzles, three of them in fact, all extraordinarily hard, with so many layers that I believe you and Megana looked at Ryan’s solution and didn’t even understand the solution. John: I have no idea. Megana: No way. John: Here’s the subject line on this email. “Have uncouth mercy, but not for me, to at its core deweaponize jerk Craig’s jigsaw alt.” Craig: Let me translate, as I did for you guys. “Have uncouth mercy” means… Uncouth is a prompt to anagram. Anagram the word mercy, but not for me, so take M-E out of mercy, and anagram R-C-Y to C-R-Y. Then “to at its core deweaponize,” go to the core of the word deweaponize, which is the letter P. That is the letter directly in the middle of the word deweaponize. Now we have C-R-Y-P. “Jerk.” A synonym for a jerk is a tic, T-I-C. “Cryptic.” Then the definition part, “Craig’s jigsaw alt,” meaning cryptic puzzles are my alternative to jigsaws, which are not puzzles at all. Ryan’s solution was perfect and perfectly complete. He did a fantastic job. He did suggest that I’ve ruined him somehow. I’m glad. Good. I hope you’re ruined permanently, Ryan. Why should I be the only one? No, you did a wonderful job. I’m so proud and pleased. John: Hooray. Craig: Then my second Cool Thing is coming up. It just passed if you’re listening to this on a normal Tuesday. You still can access it. You still have time to get your name on the list of completionists. Mark Halpin, a friend of mine and perhaps the most, what I would say, elegant puzzle constructor in the world, meaning he himself not that elegant. No, he is, but his puzzles are elegant. Every year, with the exception of last year, every year for Labor Day weekend, he releases something he calls a Labor Day Extravaganza, which is a suite of usually somewhere around 10 puzzles, all which then feed into a meta puzzle. This is a pretty standard puzzle hunt kind of thing. His puzzles are so beautifully done. They are always wrapped together thematically by some kind of interesting narrative device, typically relating to stories, folklore, and mythology from various different cultures. He’s covered pretty much every culture I can think of. His latest is called Cross Purposes. It launched, past tense, at 1 p.m. Eastern on Saturday, September 3rd. It is free, although there is an opportunity to tip him. I strongly encourage you to do so, because it’s not easy to build these things, and particularly not easy to build things as beautiful as a Mark Halpin Labor Day Extravaganza. John: Fantastic. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. Craig: Woo! John: It’s edited by Matthew Chilleli. Our outro this week is by Matthew Jordan. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to [email protected]. That’s also a place where you can send your longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the Three Page Challenges that we discussed today. You’ll find transcripts there and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and they’re great, including the new Scriptnotes Bon Jovi T-shirt. You’ll find this at Cotton Bureau. When you get those in and ordered, you can wear them to our live shows that are coming up. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on senior year. Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun show. Megana: Thank you. Craig: Thank you. [Bonus Segment] John: Senior year, that is our topic. It is the final year of high school in the US, both for our daughters, and a point of life that is frequently dramatized in movies. You see that a lot. There’s a movie I’m trying to set up which is all about senior year, because it’s such a big transition year. You are leaving one part of your life and moving on to this other part. It feels like a funeral for your younger self. Craig, what’s your recollection of senior year? Craig: You could feel that there was a line that you were leaving a place where a lot of the challenge was to see if you could get into a good college. For a lot of people, senior year is also… You’re going to be confronted by having that breakup with that boyfriend or that girlfriend. You’re going to be driving to school instead of being driven to school. You are enough of an adult where you have access to certain things you didn’t have before, but not enough of an adult to… You can vote, but you can’t smoke, although you do. You feel like you’re on the verge of freedom, and you’re also getting away from home. That may very well be the next thing. This is your last hurrah with, for a lot of people, friends they’ve had since they were in kindergarten. My daughter has gone to school in the La Cañada School District, which is a public school district where we live. She’s been in the public school system from kindergarten all the way through this year, her senior year. She has friends that she’s known since she was six. That’s a whole thing. It’s just so many transitions. The stuff that life fires at you and the speed with which it fires it at you when you are 17 or 18 is just astonishing. John: I’m definitely noticing it’s the last firsts of a lot of things. It’s her last first day. It’s going to be the last musical that they’ll do at that school. It’s going to be the last time a lot of these things are going to happen. While there are some senior traditions, things that my daughter’s school always does, like the last day rituals and a senior trip, it’s recognizing that this is the final time certain things are going to happen is even more monumental for her. Craig: I think as the year goes on, my daughter will be feeling this more and more. It’s easy now, because they just went back. They just went back, I don’t know, a couple weeks ago. As we get closer and closer to May, yeah, it’s going to be all sorts of stuff happening. It becomes almost like a yearlong celebration. Megana, you are way closer to senior year of high school than John or I. What do you remember, and how did you feel? Megana: All of the things of feeling like you are on top and like you are like big dog on campus, but then I remember feeling so anxious about this looming question of what’s going to happen next year. I’m not going to have my friends or family around me. Where am I going to go to college? I feel like that question was looming over the horizon for the entire year in a way that maybe was the first time that I really experienced anxiety. Craig: That was the last time, I’m sure. Megana: Yeah, one and done. John: Talk about that anxiety, because you were thinking about what’s going to happen next year, what colleges you’re going to get into. Once you knew where you were going to go to college, the stakes were suddenly much lower, weren’t they? Megana: Amy is also applying to colleges. Any time she asks me for questions, I’m like, “Please don’t follow my example,” because I applied to too many schools, because I couldn’t make any decisions. I applied to them literally in the minutes before the application shut down. Then with Harvard, I got in. I think I got in on April 1st. I remember telling people, and they were like, “Oh, sick joke,” because everyone assumed I was just pulling an April Fools. John: Oh, man. Craig: Were you stupid? Was that why? Were they like, “Oh my god, Megana is the dumbest person we know.” Megana: I also love April Fools. I think that’s the bigger component. Craig: That may be it. Got it. Megana: I was just so last minute on everything that I feel like I… I feel like that has continued throughout my life, where it’s like, I don’t know how much I got to enjoy it, because I was putting off decisions for so long. John: Craig, did you encounter senioritis? Craig: No, because we had been terrified by possibly urban legends, possibly not, of kids who had blown their last semester of high school and then the college rescinds the offer. The colleges said, when I got into college, they were like, “Yeah, just so you know, of course, we will be reviewing your final grades. Make sure that they’re… ” You’re like, “Oh god, I don’t want to fumble.” Also, I was in a race. I was in a valedictorian race. I couldn’t let up. Couldn’t let up. Megana: Did you win the race? John: Did you win? Craig: No. I was the salutatorian. Megana: Which is the cooler torian. Craig: I think so. It was down to 100ths of a point or whatever. This is all stupid, by the way. If you find yourself currently as a senior in a race, it doesn’t matter, unless you’re really good at giving speeches. Then you’ll get some love for a good speech. I kept it on. I kept the heat on, but without the panic of, oh no, the unknown. I had a sense, “Okay, this is where I’m going to school. This is what it’s going to be.” Then you get the whiplash of having gone from the top of the heap in your high school to once again being a nobody that doesn’t know anything and is at the bottom of the pecking order when you get to college. The difference though when you get to college is… You can get razzed by the upperclassmen going into junior high or to high school. In college, no one cares. It’s the recognition you’re never going to be that little kid who’s getting picked on again. That just all goes away. Craig: Yes, that part goes away. You’re not going to get bullied. I do recall, as a young heterosexual male, that there was definitely a certain kind of sexual politics going on where freshman heterosexual males were… It was just tougher. It was tougher. All the girls were looking upwards, and so you had to hustle. (singing) I did. I did. You know why? John: You did, and you met your wife. Craig: I did, I met my wife, although that wasn’t until I was a junior, so I had a few years of hustling. Then she put a ring on it. John: Aw. I literally had one foot out the door my senior year because I was going to… Basically I had enough credits to graduate early. I only had to go to school in the mornings. Megana: What? John: I went to classes in the mornings, and then I took a class at CU Boulder in the afternoons. I was only halfway on campus anyway. I was running the high school paper. I don’t know, it was a good transition out. It worked really well for me. I felt like I was already leaving before I was officially leaving. Craig: Interesting. Interesting. John: Really Mike was the same situation. My husband was taking classes at OSU during his senior year too. We both had a situation where we really weren’t full-time high school students senior year. Craig: He went to The Ohio State University? John: The Ohio State University. Craig: That’s one of the dumbest things. John: It is one of the dumbest things. It has to be continuously mocked. Craig: The. Please. Megana: I feel like I can’t sit here and let this continue. It is The Ohio State University. Craig: It is, because, what, there are other ones that are pretending to be Ohio State University, but we are The Ohio State University? Those are ripoff Ohio State Universities. Where are the other ones? There are no other ones. Megana: There’s Ohio University. John: Are there other OSUs that are not the one in Columbus, and so it’s only the one in Columbus is The Ohio State University? Craig: No, there’s just The Ohio State University. Megana: I was always under the impression that it was because of Ohio University that they did that. There’s Oregon State University. John: Why would that work? Craig: Why don’t they just underline the word State, Ohio State University? No, they stick the word The on it, which no one else does, for good reason. John: Maybe we should be The Scriptnotes Podcast. Craig: That’s a perfect analogy. Welcome to The Scriptnotes Podcast. That’s just ridiculous. The odds are that neither one of us survive to see October based on what we just did, because man, I’ll tell you, Ohio fans, phew. John: That’s why we keep these conversations in the Premium feed, so at least we’re getting money for the hate coming our way. Craig: Yes, there will be hate coming our way, and also long emails. Oh my god, so many long emails. “This is why,” blah blah blah, blah blah blah. I’m already making fun of your email. Don’t send it. John: The end of high school is also graduation. Craig, did you have a good high school graduation? Craig: I did. High school graduation went well. John: Did you have to give a salutatorian speech? Craig: I did. I gave a salutatorian- John: What was your topic? Craig: For the life of me, I cannot remember. John: Do you have it written down anywhere? Craig: Not anymore. It was written down, but we’re talking about something that I think I probably wrote it by hand and then typed it into my Macintosh and then printed it on my Brother Daisywheel printer. Oh, Megana, you never knew the joys of a Daisywheel printer. Megana: I’m totally lost here. John: Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap. Craig: Basically, it was like an electric typewriter. You would say, okay, print this. It would pull all the text into its memory. Then there was a wheel, a disc, a plastic disc, and at the tips of it were the letters. It would spin and hammer the letter. It was like the world’s fastest typist. It was loud and so much slower than a laser printer, not even close. I probably did that. Where it went… I tried to erase my past as best I could. John: We’ve noticed that. We have video footage of Ted Cruz from his freshman year. I wonder if somebody filmed Craig’s salutatorian speech. Craig: I think that’s wonderful. John: If someone who’s listening can track that down, that would’ve been from 1989? Craig: Eight. John: ’88. Craig: That was spring of 1988 in Freehold, New Jersey. If somebody has the video of my salutatory address, we’d love to see it. If you have it and it’s on VHS, we’ll gladly pay for the transfer. John: Good stuff. Craig, Megana, thank you for a good senior year. Megana: Thank you. Craig: Thank you. See you next week. John: Bye. Megana: Bye. Links: Our first post-pandemic liveshow will be on October 19, 2022 and tickets will be available to premium members on September 9! Order your new Scriptnotes Shirt here! Things I Think Are Awesome: Hunger Stones and Stability, Lynn Cherny’s substack Made-Up Words Trick AI Text-To-Image Generators Discover Magazine This Word Does Not Exist @Dribnet’s Twitter Thread on Splaflut MoviePass beta MoviePass Will Work This Time* Alex Kirshner writing for Slate Netflix turns 25 HBO Max Cynthia Littleton for Variety Secret History of Mac Gaming Happy Halpinmas Mark Halpin’s Labor Day Puzzles Three Page Challenge Selections: Oculum by Larry Bambrick, We’re All Very Tired by Marissa Gawel, Wake by Jordan Johnson Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt! Check out the Inneresting Newsletter Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription! Craig Mazin on Twitter John August on Twitter John on Instagram Outro by Matthew Jordan (send us yours!) Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Email us at [email protected] You can download the episode here.The post Scriptnotes Episode 565: Sorry to Splaflut, Transcript first appeared on John August.

The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 555 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, I’m talking with the Emmy Award-winning writer behind Marvel’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and the Emmy Award-winning writer of Marvel’s Loki series, who happened to be the very same person. Welcome to the show, Michael Waldron. Michael Waldron: Thanks for having me. Five hundred and how many? John: Five hundred and fifty-five episodes. Michael: Wow. John: That’s a lot. Michael: You brought me on for this milestone episode. Thank you so much. John: This is the milestone, yes. Chris McCoy we always bring on every 200 episodes, to celebrate our bicentennial or whatever. You’re every whatever 555 is. That’s what you are. Michael: I’ll see you the 1,010th episode. John: That’s when we’ll bring you back on. By that point, we’ll have even more to talk about, but what I want to talk with you about today is the mushy boundaries between TV and movies and the role of writer and this weird transition and convergence that we’re facing. We’ll also have some listener questions that I think you’re especially well suited to answer. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, I want to talk with you about Atlanta, because you’re from Atlanta. You live in Atlanta now while you’re shooting some stuff. It feels like all of Hollywood will eventually live in Atlanta. I’m hoping that maybe you can give our listeners your writer’s guide to Atlanta. Michael: Cool, sounds great. John: Let’s get into it. I’m just for the first time meeting you on this Zoom. I really have no idea about your backstory and how you became a writer. What is the quick Michael Waldron origin story? Michael: Yes, I’m from Atlanta. I went to University of Georgia. I guess I graduated from college in 2010, which was a time that… It was before the whole movie industry had moved out here. It felt like being a screenwriter was an impossible thing to do. I had not grown up really writing scripts or anything. I just loved movies. I was going to go to law school, and at the last second was like, “I don’t want to be a lawyer. I just like watching Jeff Winger on Community. I like lawyers in movies and on TV.” I bailed on that, and I went out to California, which is the first time I’d even been. I’d never even seen the Pacific Ocean until I got out there. I went to Pepperdine. They have a screenwriting MFA program, which was great for me. I fell under the tutelage of some really amazing mentors, a guy named Chris Chluess, who was the showrunner of Night Court for a long time, Emmy-winning writer and just a genius, and Sheryl Anderson, who’s the creator/showrunner, Sweet Magnolias on Netflix. I had some great professors. Before, I just knew how to write some jokes and some funny, stupid stuff. They really taught me how to write scripts. From there, I was fortunate enough to land an internship on the first season of Rick and Morty. That was really, really lucky. I was a huge fan of Dan Harmon, because I love Community, even when I was back in Georgia. John: Before we get on there, I want to talk to you about film school here, because we get a lot of questions about like, “Oh, should I go to film school?” It sounds like for you, you were growing up in Atlanta, you were going to school in Atlanta, you were interested in film, so you just applied to film school and had no other plan or exposure to the film industry, other than like this is how you were going to get started, right? Michael: Yeah. To me, it was the way I could wrap my head around getting out to LA, because I had no connections, knew nobody in the industry, had no way of getting a job. I was like, “I’ll just go into debt. I’ll just take on a lot of student loan debt.” John: I want to get more, because we don’t have a lot of guests who actually went through film school. I went through film school for grad school. You show up. Is it a two-year program or a three-year program? Michael: It’s a two-year program. I think you could take your time. I did it in two years because I wanted to get out and start working. The cool thing about Pepperdine was it was very practical. It was based on just writing pilots, specs. Each semester, you were creating an original piece of work. I had that very difficult process demystified for me very early on, where I was like, “Okay, I know how to write a pilot and create a world.” Chris Chluess, my professor, did a great thing, where at the end of the semester, I took a half-hour comedy pilot writing class with him, where at the end you had to come in and pitch the show to him and an agent that he brought in. Only at the end did we learn that the agent was actually a real estate agent who was a neighbor of his in the Palisades. It was an incredible simulation of the pressure that I would go on to feel later in my career in some rooms where there’s some real skin in the game. I benefited from a couple of really fantastic professors. John: You have good professors, but you obviously did something right while you were in that program. Imagine you’re a listener listening to this right now who is in a film program, is in a screenwriting program. What are things you could do in a screenwriting class to get the most out of it? What are the practical steps a student could take if you’re in one of those classes right now, to really dig the most out? Michael: It’s the time. You’re paying a lot of money to be focused on writing. Now is the time. When I went there, I was still a lazy undergrad college kid. I had to shift out of that mentality and start learning how to be a professional writer, treat deadlines like real deadlines. The other thing that was actually really helpful for me was the process of reading classmates’ stuff and giving notes on that, because that’s what you’re doing as a writer, especially in a writers’ room, all the time, is you’re reading stuff, you’re pitching, you’re giving feedback. I was there with Eric Martin, a guy who became a close friend of mine and wrote on Loki with me, went on to work with me on Loki. He and I, we just said we’re going to treat each class like a writers’ room, and every script is a professional script that we want to try and get made with our feedback and everything. I think you just take it seriously. It really is one of those things that you get out of it what you put into it. John: Yeah, because it’s not like going through a law program or a medical program where there’s clearly like, these are the things you’re going to learn, and you’re going to be tested on these things. It’s not that, because you could probably graduate that program and not really have learned a lot or not really have grown that much, correct? Michael: A thousand percent. Also, your degree- John: Has anyone ever asked for your degree? Michael: Nobody cares. It’s worthless. You’re only there to learn, to make connections, and to hopefully come out of there with original material. That’s the other thing, samples that you can show to potential collaborators, people that are going to help you on your way up in the industry. I wrote the first draft of Heels, my show on Starz, in a class at Pepperdine. It was very, very helpful for me, because I was just finishing stuff. John: Now, the other thing you got out of this program, apparently, was connections that got you an internship. You got an internship with Dan Harmon’s company. That was set up through the school? Michael: It was set up through a buddy of mine who was a classmate, who was working on the first season of Rick and Morty. I had a chance to go on and be an intern on the first season, which was a blast. John: We had Drew Goddard on the show, we’ve had Damon Lindelof on the show, who both said that working on a first season of the show was incredibly hard or being on the ground in a first season of the show was hard because everything was chaos and was constantly falling apart. Sometimes, because of the chaos, you could really learn a lot and you could see how it’s all being put together and be useful. Were you able to be helpful on that first season? Michael: I think so. I think I totally benefited from the fact that it was a first season show. Nobody knew what it was going to be, at a little fledgling animation studio that Dan had just started with a couple of friends. I came in as the intern. The thing that I did is I made sure everybody knew from the beginning that I wanted to be a writer. That was who I was. Any time there was a hole that could be plugged with an intern who knew how to write, I was the first one to raise my hand. The other thing that I did while I was there, weirdly, was I started a softball team, I guess as a stealth way to get to know Dan and Dino Stamatopoulos, one of the other owners. They played on the team. I was the coach. It worked out for me, because I went from being the intern to the coach. In that sense, I became a friend and a peer. That friendship led to my first real job as a writer’s PA on Season 5 of Community. John: You talk about being an intern and offering to write anything they needed to have written. What are some examples of things you would’ve written as an intern on that show? Michael: It wasn’t even necessarily Rick and Morty specific. It was just as simple as somebody’s got to make a sign to wash your hands or to wash the dishes in the kitchen. It’s like, that’s a chance to be creative. At some point, one of these great writers that’s working here you hope is going to see this stuff and say, “This is actually funny. Who’s doing this stuff?” You’re just trying to put yourself out there. Then writing coverage and just treating everything, every assignment like your life depends on it from a writing standpoint, because as far as I was concerned, it did. John: You’re working there. You’re writing there on small things. When are you letting them or asking them to read the stuff you’ve been writing for Pepperdine? When are you asking if someone’s willing to read your samples? Michael: A long time, if ever. I don’t know if I ever did. That was another great piece of advice I got from my mentor, Chris Chluess. He said, “Think of it. You’re sitting at a card table. You only get to cash in those chips, your equity with these guys, one time. You have to be really, really shrewd with where you asked for something, essentially.” It’s a political game. In fact, I think earlier in your career… Obviously, it’s harder now because not everything’s in person. You’re almost, I found, better off selling people on your personality as a colleague and as a collaborator, and then let them be blown away down the line when you’re actually a really good writer. I can’t remember how long it took for me to ask Dan to read something. It was years and years down from our relationship. John: You’re starting off in Rick and Morty land. Then you’re going over to Community. You said you’re a writers’ room assistant? Michael: I was the writer’s PA. John: What was your job like doing that? Michael: It was a nightmare. It was a nightmare. John: Were you getting the lunch order? Michael: Oh my god, the lunch, the dinner, the snack, the coffees, the midnight stack. It really was a blast, but that was a grind. I don’t know, there were like 13 writers that season. It was Season 5 of a network show, 13 or 14 writers. They had assistants. Each coffee order was a double decker, two boxes. I just remember trudging across Paramount with all that. I was getting lunches, getting meals and everything, but I asked Dan if when I wasn’t doing that, if I could sit in the writers’ room and just listen and learn. He was great, and he let me. Then I got to know all the other great writers there and suddenly had a whole new network of great mentors, which included Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, who’d written all the Spider-Man movies. I would show up early to sit in Erik Sommers’s office and just ask him, “What does a manager do vs an agent? What does your attorney… ” I really benefited from there just being so many good folks who wanted to help me learn. After a certain amount of time, I had I guess earned enough trust to open my mouth and start pitching bad jokes. I got to feel that feeling of, oh, I just pitched a joke that crashed and burned. It was no good. Then I got to feel the feeling of, the world didn’t end. Nobody cares, because everybody’s pitching stuff all day, and a lot of it dies. Then the next thing you know, you pitch something that makes it into the show, and you can tell your wife, “Hey, look, I wrote that joke.” I think that was 2014. We worked from June until January. It was crazy. The hours were insane. In a lot of ways, I feel like I learned everything there. John: Now, there was an amazing chance to learn things there. We’ve been talking with support staff over the last couple years about those jobs and how underpaid they are and how hard it is for some people to make a living or even keep a roof over their head doing those jobs. Was that your experience? Was the pay low, the hours long? How were you surviving during that time? Michael: You’re certainly not handsomely paid. On that show, we worked such insane hours that I was actually making a decent amount from overtime. I got some checks that I was like, “Holy crap.” I was lucky in that sense. The food budget was so astronomical. I was in charge of the food. There was always an extra pizza or a tray of sushi coming home with me. I figured out how to scrounge my way through life. Of course, it’s a grind. Everybody, all the support staff is working just as hard as the writers and as everybody else. We’ve got to take better care of those folks, because you can’t do the job without them. John: Now, what is your transition from you’re sort of in the room on Community, you’re now a repped writer who’s making things? What was that transition? 2014 or so when you’re in this writers’ room. When do you start getting some stuff that is Michael Waldron as a writer in himself? Michael: That was on the end of Community. I got an email from a guy on the support staff, another assistant, who said that a young agent was looking to discover talent on the support staff, which I know now, an absolute lie. I said, “Wow, this is my big shot.” I sent this supposed young agent the pilot for Heels. They responded. This guy named Harry turned out to just be the assistant to a manager, who was a guy my age, but wanted to meet me. Long story short, the guy’s my manager until today. We met. We went to The Den in West Hollywood or something. I had my first experience of, oh wow, here’s a guy who feels like a real gatekeeper talking to me about an original script I wrote, giving me feedback but also talking like he wants to be an advocate for me, and he was. I did some revisions on that script based on his feedback and some other folks he introduced me to. That kicked off I guess that first general meeting tour. You’re meeting the people your age. Everybody’s climbing the ladder at the same pace. You’re meeting young creative executives or assistants and people that are looking to be somebody who discovered someone. Through that, I guess I legitimized the project enough, and there was enough interest in it, that my manager’s company LBI actually took me on as a client. They called me in to their big office, and I sat on the giant table for network. I was like, “Oh my god.” It was like, “We want to rep you.” That felt like wow, I did it. Then of course, you didn’t do it. You didn’t do anything. Shortly after that, I met a guy who was working at Paramount television who would go on to become one of my best friends. He really championed the show over there. In about 2015, 2016, Paramount Television optioned Heels. It was funny how it happened. He called me and he was like, “Yeah, we want to have a general with you. Some of my bosses read it.” Then on the way over, called me and was like, “No, this is a pitch. We’re really interested.” John: Oh my god. Michael: It’s like, I don’t know what happens in this show. This is a sample. There was a lot of tap dancing and making it up as I went, but they got it. I got really lucky to just get into development on something original of my own very young. I was just learning and getting to go through that process. You learn so, so much. John: If we were to watch the pilot of Heels today, the series that exists, and the sample that you wrote in film school, how close are they? Michael: The one that I wrote in film school was markedly worse. I actually can look and realize that my writing took a genuine professional leap after going through Community, working on Community, and then suddenly finding myself in real professional situations where the stakes are higher. That actually made me raise my game. It’s not just a homework assignment anymore. You realize that this is something I’m trying to get on television and change my life. I have to put everything I have into this. It’s a hell of a lot better. John: At this stage, you’re working on Heels. It’s great to have development. This is actually getting money coming in the door, which is fantastic and probably much needed. Were you thinking, okay, now I should try to staff on TV, now I should try to write a feature? What were the other things you were thinking about doing? Obviously, it’s never just one job. You need to keep it going. Michael: Money coming in the door was insane. I thought about staffing. I guess in my mind, I was like, “I’m a showrunner. I’m a creator. I’m a showrunner. I’m going to get this show made.” So naïve. So stupid. I was like 26. That was I was determined to do. I had the good fortune of I was continuing to work with Dan in a more producorial, executive context. I had some other money coming in the door. I was helping Dan develop some stuff as a producer, which I only knew anything about that because I was just going through it on my own on the other side. I hadn’t written a feature. John: That’s crazy you had not written a feature, throughout the whole time in film school that you never finished one feature. Michael: I thought I was going to be a comedy writer. I was mostly focused on that. Then I fell in love with the one-hour world. Like I said, I got lucky, and then Heels caught fire. People really responded to it. It always felt like it had so much momentum. I was like, “I don’t want to step away from this thing. I want to always be able to run it.” Now, I remember I applied for the WGA Showrunner Training Program. In my interview, they were like, “Why are you applying for… Why don’t you go get a staff job? What are you doing?” I was like, “I don’t know, I’m a writer.” John: I had the experience where I had a very hot script go that was getting a lot of attention. I was able to sell a TV show and make a TV show, a one-hour TV show for the WB. I was a showrunner who had no business being a showrunner. I think the WGA folks would’ve looked at me as well and said, “Why the hell are you doing… You should not be doing this.” I wish someone had pulled me aside to tell me that. Michael: I needed it, yeah, jeez, because eventually, I would get into that position a year later and have no clue what I was doing. John: It was just rough. Jump us forward a little bit in time to… Was Heels the first thing of yours that was wholly yours that got made? Michael: No, the first thing that was wholly mine that got made was Loki. John: Did Loki come out before Heels? Michael: Yeah, Loki came out last June, and Heels came out in August. Long story short, what happened was Heels went to a mini room that I ran, as an idiot, but had a great writing staff. I didn’t know what I was doing, didn’t know how to lead a writing staff. I had some great collaborators and ended up writing a great season. We just couldn’t cast it, couldn’t cast the show. Starz put it on a shelf. I was like, “That’s it for me. I’m moving home. That’s end. That’s the end of my meteoric rise.” I licked my wounds, wrote a feature, just to do it, and then went off and actually got that staffing experience on Rick and Morty. I was a writer and producer on Season 4 of Rick and Morty, went back and got to feel like what it was like on the other side of the whiteboard, which was very helpful, to be a showrunner, to know what your writers are feeling like and their anxieties as they’re pitching and coming in every day. Then right toward the end of Season 4, that feature that I’d written made its way over to Marvel. It was a time travel action comedy that just happened to be the perfect sample for the Loki show they were developing. That’s how I got in the game on that project. John: Great. Now, before we get into Loki here, I do want to talk about the mini room you did for Heels. How many writers did you have in that room? You said you did it wrong. Tell us some lessons you learned in doing it wrong. Michael: There was six of us, I believe. I didn’t know how to synthesize all of my writers’ tremendous ideas while still making it be my vision. That was just a hard thing of how do I take what your room is wanting it to be and reconcile that with what I want it to be. Every day I walked away being like, “Am I making the show I even want to make?” Then I wasn’t really giving them great instructions for the first half of the room. It took a while for me to realize that at least my best approach to a writers’ room is if you’re the showrunner, if it’s your thing, then your writers’ room is an extension of your vision, the voices in your head. The best thing I think you can do as a showrunner is just listen, is to throw something out there, an idea that you’re interested in pursuing, part of your vision, and then let your writers take it somewhere really, because that’s what you’ll be doing at home in your head anyways. Here you have the benefit of great professionals who can do it out loud. It just took me a while to realize that that was the way to do it as opposed to I was a guy who was used to just sitting at home on my couch writing and doing it all on my own. That’s what I had to learn is you don’t have to do it all on your own. John: Now, when Heels finally did shoot, were they using the scripts that you had come out of from that room, or did you have to go back and take everything out of that? Michael: It was a combination. The first half of the season was pretty much locked and loaded. We needed to do big revisions on the back half. They brought in Mike O’Malley, the great writer and actor who had created Survivor’s Remorse for Starz, brought in him as showrunner. It was crazy, because it really did feel like I was giving my baby to someone. When they wanted to revive it in 2019, I was off doing Loki, and so there was no way I could do it. I had to give Mike the keys to this car that was very personal to me. Really, I owe Heels everything. I owe it my life, those characters and that world. He was just so gracious and generous and made the show better every step of the way. That in itself was a great learning experience of the ultimate collaboration, giving something so personal to someone else. John: Let’s jump ahead to Loki here. I want to talk through the process from, okay, Michael, you got the job to now the cameras are rolling and we’re starting to shoot this show. What time frame was that? What were the steps along the way? They’re meeting with you. You’re pitching how you would do it. You get the job. What is your first step? Are you making documents just by yourself? Are you immediately going into a room situation? What is the process like for this Marvel series? Michael: It was really the dawn of the Marvel series. Loki was the third or fourth one to go. It was at first very solitary. It felt almost like I guess developing a feature. Then it was just meeting with our executive team and pitching on… The core idea they had was, here’s Loki, and it’s Loki and the TVA. The pitch that I developed was where does it go from there. It’s Loki hunting a variant of himself across time. Once I got the job, first off there was a process of mourning leaving Rick and Morty, where I’d been for nine months and created a lot of great friendships and was very comfortable. There was a real comfort level there. I was going into a situation of total unknown. It was hiring a staff and launching a room. This time around, I knew what I was doing. On the first day of the Heels writers’ room, the only person I actually knew what to tell to do was the writers’ PA. I was like, “Here’s how the lunch order should go,” because that was the job I had had. On the first day in the Loki writers’ room, I knew I have a vision for how I want this story to go, and I want us to all get there together. John: Is everybody looking at the same document? Are you talking at them for an hour about the big, broad strokes vision? What are those initial conversations? Michael: There was a core document that I… They read my pitch that I gave to Kevin Feige that got me the job. It was pretty thorough. Here are the six episodes. Honestly, they’re generally what the episodes ended up being. Episode 3 is Loki and Sylvie are crossing a moon together. Then you want to hear, okay, my brilliant writers, what do you think the best version of a Loki show can be? They know the general framework and where I and Marvel would like to take it. In the case of that show, our first job was let’s figure out the emotional story of this thing. Let’s figure out what each of the six episodes is. We can say Episode 2 is the zodiac episode. Episode 3 is Before Sunrise. We know what each episode is. Then we had to take about two weeks and just do time travel, which was its own… That was a new experience of really doing a sci-fi camp together, of a lot of us drawing lines, squiggly lines on the whiteboard, and just trying to create a shared institutional language of what is time travel in this show, what is a time law, how can it be broken, because we had to all be on the same page. By the end, it felt like we’d been in the writers’ room for 60 weeks, not 3 or 4. John: That first writers’ room was how many weeks long? Michael: Twenty, and that was it. John: Was it enough? Michael: It was enough to get solid first drafts of everything. The one tricky part of it is I hadn’t written the pilot. That’s the one atypical part of the process there was I hadn’t written the pilot as the writers’ room launched. It was about 9 or 10 weeks in, it became really important for me to get a decent version of the pilot written so that we could establish the tone of the show. Otherwise, it becomes really hard to write a writer’s draft if you don’t really know what the tone of the show is going to be. John: For sure. During this 20 weeks, you guys are breaking these 6 episodes. Were there story areas? Were there outlines? What are the actual written documents that are coming out of this process, before there are scripts? Michael: Everything starts with me with a story circle, which comes from the Dan Harmon camp. John: Very familiar, yes. Michael: From the Dan Harmon camp. That was how we broke our stories, which probably drove everybody else crazy, because I think everybody else prefers to do note cards. Even I am like, note cards are probably more efficient. It was outlines. It was let’s get a beat sheet that we feel good about and then let’s send a writer off to write an outline. That outline goes up the flagpole. Once that’s approved, we’ll write a draft. John: A beat sheet is one to two pages. An outline is longer. Are those the right lengths? Michael: Yeah, I think our outlines were, I don’t know, never more than 10 pages. Again, that’s probably a function of my own personal style. I am a bad planner. I like to discover it on the page. I’m more apt to send someone off to outline or to script with a little less figured out and leave some room for discovery, which is exactly what happened in Loki Episode 102 a lot. So much of the great stuff with Loki and Mobius in that episode was Elissa Karasik, our writer. I just trusted her to go off and say, “Go figure some of this stuff out,” and she did. It was all great. I was glad that we didn’t waste time in the room trying to figure out all the details when you can just rely on your writers to do that. John: Is the first time the studio is seeing the specifics of what happens, are they seeing [inaudible 00:33:17] or they’re seeing the outline? Michael: In the Loki process, we actually had our executives, our producers in the room with us. It was atypical but really fantastic. John: Were they listening or contributing? Michael: Contributing. It was great. It was like having other writers, other producers, somebody there who, A, is incredibly steeped in the Marvel lore, what’s come before. They also know what’s coming next. The most important role that is Stephen Broussard and Kevin Wright, they’re producers, but they’re also filmmakers. They may as well have been writers on our team for all the great ideas they had. Some of the most valuable things they did was know the stuff that Kevin Feige and the higher-ups were not going to respond to. Instead of spending five days in the room chasing a storyline that’s just going to end up being an absolute non-starter, you’ve got somebody to say, “No, don’t go there. I don’t think anybody’s going to really respond to that.” As a showrunner, or as somebody running a room, that is invaluable to not have to burn that time. John: Jac Schaeffer was on the show, and she was talking about how on the first day of her writers’ room, she had up on all the walls all this imagery about what she wanted the show to look like and feel like, because she was in a physical room. You were in a physical room your whole time too, because this is all pre-pandemic. Michael: Yes, I was in a physical room. The first time I walked by Jac’s room and saw it, absolutely, I was like, “I got to quit.” I was like, “This is a nightmare. I’m bad at my job,” because we shared a wall. They were the room right next to us. You look in there, and I was like, “Oh my god, it’s so organized.” By the way, her writer’s assistant was a guy named Clay Lapari, who was the writer’s assistant on Community with me a hundred years ago. It all comes back around. I came in, I was like, “We got to print some pictures out.” We did. I felt better once we had that stuff up there. John: Earlier you referenced on Heels this other guy, Mike O’Malley, was coming in to be a showrunner on that show, and yet you’re listed as head writer on Loki. What is the distinction? Is there a meaningful distinction? Job-wise, what he was doing versus what you’re doing, are they similar? Michael: The Marvel shows don’t have a showrunner. I guess the best way I know to put it is it’s you and the director, whoever the producing director is, you’re passing a baton over to them and working in tandem together, whereas if you’re Mike O’Malley, the showrunner, he’s the final say over the head of directors on set, through the edit, through everything. The Marvel process is I guess a much more collaborative one, where at least in TV I’m not necessarily the final say. I was like, “There’s definitely an opportunity to have my ego bruised by this.” You realize, “I’m not the showrunner of this.” Then quickly it’s like, “I just want the show to be great.” When we hired Kate, her and I were so instantly on the same page creatively, and her level of ambition with the show matched mine. It was like, “This is going to be good. This is going to work.” John: This is Kate Herron, the director? Michael: Yes. John: At what point in the process did she come on board and did you start having these conversations? Was the room finished? Was the room still going? Michael: Yeah, maybe, I don’t know, a month or two prior. She came in at a great time in the process where we had our first drafts. I was making my way through my revisions on everything. She represented just creative, fresh eyes. I’m like, “Hey, we’ve all gone insane this summer making this crazy time travel show. Does this make any sense to you as a normal person?” Also, a practical filmmaker’s perspective. We’ve got a trained heist sequence. I could sit with Kate so I’m not wasting a week writing an action sequence that is simply un-renderable on screen. John: I want to get to some listener questions, but I don’t want to skip all over Doctor Strange and your involvement on Doctor Strange. I’ve done a zillion features. This was your first feature to do. How did you take your experiences on these TV shows and apply it here? Did they apply? What did it feel like to be a writer on a feature? Michael: Weirdly, it felt like TV. Sometimes it felt like showrunning. That’s just a testament to how collaborative Sam Raimi is and that he empowered me so much. He and I had a really special kinship together, forged by the fact that we were coming up with a movie over the course of 2020 when the world was ending around us. I was not on set of Loki. I was getting ready to fly to Atlanta to be on set. I got a call that said, “We need you more right now on Doctor Strange.” John: Doctor Strange was shooting in London? Michael: Shooting in London. Then COVID hit, and it became the last two and a half years of my life. I was on set every day of Doctor Strange. I was there for six months last year locked down in London. When I think about Doctor Strange, really I think about it as much of a filmmaking experience as a writing one. I was writing, but it was also just so much working with our actors and working alongside and learning from Sam about directing and everything he does. When I think about Doctor Strange, I just think about being cold on set in London. John: A lot of being on set is just being cold or hot or being in the sun when you don’t want to be in the sun. Michael: Exactly. John: Or cursing the sun for coming up when you’re supposed to be shooting nights and you run out of night. Michael: Precisely. It was an absolute adventure that didn’t… Probably 2020 and 2021 for a lot of people doesn’t quite feel real, but yet again was an amazing experience, where I just got to learn so much. John: Great. We have some listener questions. This first one I see is actually about film school. It feels like exactly what we should have you talk to us about. Megana, what’s the first question here? Megana Rao: Live and Die By Approval from Columbus, Ohio wrote in, “I was recently accepted to USC School of Cinematic Arts. As a country bumpkin from the shire of Ohio in the twilight of his 20s, this is an honor and huge dream come true. Recently, we had a meeting about financial aid options. The thing I most anticipated hearing about were merit-based scholarships. Turns out they emailed everyone who had received a scholarship earlier that day, and I received no such email. It’s funny, despite having gotten into one of the most competitive film schools in the world, I already feel like I’m not enough. If this class is a group of people who they view as having a unique voice among thousands of other voices, I somehow feel like I’m already on the low end of this elite totem pole. “I guess I’m asking for any words of advice you may have on handling rejection or I’m not enough self-judgments. It’s one thing to battle those voices in your personal life. In dating, for instance, sometimes people just don’t fit. It’s another thing entirely when there’s something as measurable as money at stake to validate your insecurities.” John: To summarize, Live and Die has gotten into a great film school but feels bad because they didn’t get a merit-based scholarship. They feel like they’re coming in at the bottom of this class or not at the top of this class. Michael: As somebody who got rejected from USC’s screenwriting program, I would say congratulations. Also, your ability to focus on defeat, even in the glow of victory, means you’ll probably be a very successful writer, because that is a quality we all share. If I’m reading between the lines of that, I know what it’s like to feel like a country bumpkin wanting to go out to Hollywood and make it. I’d say first off, that is a voice that needs to be… Shit, I’ve made a career out of it. Hollywood needs country bumpkins too. It is an honor to get in, and Hollywood does need your voice, clearly, or you wouldn’t have gotten accepted. I think rejection that is tied to finances is a bummer. That’s just your first lesson in film school, because that is going to be your whole career is rejection tied to finances. Steel yourself now. John: I would say, Live and Die, that you’re having a feeling, and feelings don’t come from logic. Sometimes we try to use logic to justify the feelings that we’re having. If we actually check the facts, you got into one of the best film schools in the country, if not the best film school. This obsession with a merit-based scholarship is like… What are they actually measuring? Do you even know how many people are getting them, why people get them? Do the people who get them succeed more often than the people who don’t? I think just hearing Michael on this podcast today, he was talking about how you get value out of film school. It’s actually by showing up and just doing the work all the time and try to do your very best in it. So often, I think as writers, we were probably really good at being in school and were probably really good at getting grades and everyone commending for our writing. Suddenly, when you get into a place where you’re not necessarily the best, you panic that you’re the worst. That’s just not true. You could come in there with a head of steam and actually get amazing stuff done while you’re in film school. I understand your feelings, but you got to push them aside and be excited to be at USC. Megana, do we have another question? Megana: Yes. Cherry asks, “After years of struggling to break in, I’ve signed my first contract to write a feature, and it will qualify me for the WGA. I’m thrilled to finally be in the game, but now the real work begins. My primary focus is nailing it with this project. My question is, what should I be doing to prepare myself for the next step? “I have new spec scripts that will be ready to share soon. I’ve had a couple meetings with managers and an offer of representation. I have a light relationship with some producers, agents, and development execs who have read my work. How do I go about getting the next job or getting my new material in front of the right people? It seems like the next step would be to sign with a manager, but I’m not sure how to navigate that. What am I looking for in a manager? More importantly, what am I looking to avoid in a manager? If I didn’t work with a manager at this stage, what would an alternative game plan be?” John: Michael, you’ve had a manager all this time. Talk to us about managers. Michael: My relationship with my two managers has been one of the most important parts of my career, as has my relationship with my agents. I’ve had the same team my whole career, which is atypical. My answer to that is it’s all personality base. I am teamed with people that I click with on a personal level whose values align with mine. It’s not based on agency or management company clout. Wherever you’re going to seek representation, I wouldn’t even say tell yourself you need a manager vs an agent. You need somebody that you connect with and that can be an advocate for you. That’s the most important thing. Then as far as what is that next thing, it’s doing a great job on the project you just landed, which is amazing. Congratulations. That is the most important thing. That’s what will get you the next jobs is kicking ass on the thing you just got hired on. Really, don’t think too much beyond that other than maybe know what is the one thing that I have behind this that I believe in the most that I would show someone when that next opportunity comes calling. John: You’re going to probably end up signing with some manager, Cherry, who is going to take you on the water bottle tour of Los Angeles that Michael was describing earlier where they just sit you in a bunch of rooms and you talk with people. That’s good. That’s a natural function. Whether it’s this person who’s already introduced themselves to you and wants to represent you… Maybe it’s them. A really good place to check on that is the other producers you have light relationships with. Ask them. Say, “Hey, this person offered to represent me. What do you think of this person? Is this a good match?” If not, they might suggest a better person or a different person you could meet with. All of my previous assistants have gone on to have writing careers, and most of them had managers. In every case, they would come to me like, “I think this person is great, but I get a weird feeling.” If you get a weird feeling, that’s not the right person. You should not sign with a manager or a representative or a lawyer who you dread taking their phone calls or dread getting their emails. It has to be somebody you’re excited to be on the phone with, because otherwise it’s just not going to work. Michael: Hundred percent agree with that. John: Megana, do you have another question for us? Megana: Yes. Moomin asks, “In the conception phase before any word of the screenplay is put to paper, what tools or methods do you both use to keep everything organized? Where do you compile all your thoughts, ideas, and bits and pieces?” John: What are you doing for that stuff, Michael? Michael: Not being as efficient as I should. A lot of my writing is done walking my dog, going for walks in the woods, or driving around. Then as far as recording it, it’s usually going onto my iPad and doing story circles and stuff. John: Are you doing story circles just with a pen and drawing? Michael: Yeah, just to get it down. In the inception phase, that’s what I’m doing. I spend a lot of time just daydreaming. I don’t necessarily need to write it all down, because I feel like anything that I don’t remember probably wasn’t that good of an idea to begin with. It’s the stuff that I can’t let go of, finally I know it’s time to put this down. Then when I’m actually writing a script, my process becomes really inefficient, because the way I’ll write a scene is I’ll just retype it over and over and over again, making little, minute changes here and there, because I just need to… It’s how I play the scene out in my head is typing it out. John: I loop scenes just in my head first. I have the blocking for everybody and the rough dialog. I will do a scribble version, which I’m just like, the quickest version on paper I can possibly get down so I don’t forget it. Then I’ll start tackling the scene. I’ll know that sometimes in this loose version, some stuff’s just not making sense. I’ll work on that when I get to the real final version. That scribbling process isn’t part of my overall note taking or overall recordkeeping. I think more what Moomin’s asking for is those general ideas that come to you, you don’t want to lose. I’ll have index cards everywhere. I’ll just scribble it down on an index card. Then I just try to process those once a day. I just put them in. Now we’re using Notion, but we used to use other tools for that, just so they are someplace. I don’t look back to that that often, but sometimes I do need to find that thing, or if at least it’s in the same document, I can say, oh, all of these ideas go together, and they fit in a meaningful way. If I don’t write something down, I’m going to have to keep spending brain cycles to remember it, because it’ll go away. I want to use those brain cycles to do new stuff, rather than just remembering stuff. Michael: That’s how I end up looking back in my Notes app. I’m like, “2016 Moby Dick in space?” John: Fantastic. Michael: What an idea. John: It’s come time for our One Cool Things, where we recommend something to our listeners. Michael, do you have something to recommend to the folks listening to this podcast? Michael: Yes. A cool thing that I’m going to recommend is giving blood, which is a cause that has become near and dear to my heart. One of my best friends, a writer and actor named Breck Denny, who was a member of the Groundlings, he passed away earlier this year. He was a beneficiary of a lot of blood donations. They were trying to save him. Cycled through an outrageous amount of blood in the hospital. What I learned on the other end of that process is just how bad of a blood shortage there is in the country right now and how far a single blood donation can go. We’re at a historic shortage of blood in the country. My buddy, he was one of the first people to get COVID back in 2020. After that, he started giving blood religiously, so they could test blood, and was actually part of vaccine trials and everything. He was just a great guy. As a way to honor him, we created a blood drive called Blood for Breck. You can find it in my Instagram bio. I think it’s on my Twitter. You can go there and pledge to give blood. Really, giving blood, it’s an awesome thing that you go, you do it for 30 minutes, you get to take a picture. It just makes such a difference. It really does save lives. I don’t know. I feel like in a day and age where we spend a lot of time being like, “How can I help?” and it’s like, if I just do an online challenge and donate money, where does that money go? What is this? A bag of your blood is going to go into somebody’s body that’s fighting for their life. It’s just not a thing I ever really thought about until this touched our world, and so now it’s something I’m passionate about. John: That’s great. Back in college I donated blood and loved donating blood. As of right now, we’re recording this in Pride month of 2022, gay men still can’t donate blood in the US, which is crazy. There’s lots of work being done to try to fix that problem. If you can donate blood, donating blood is a great idea. We’ll put a link in the show notes to your blood donation charity and some other blood donation drives out there across the country. Michael: Great. John: My One Cool Thing is this essay I read this week by Elizabeth Williamson in Slate. It was an excerpt from her book about Sandy Hook. I’ll put a link in the show notes to this. I’ve always been fascinated by conspiracy theorists and people who believe in impossible things. The people who believe school shootings didn’t happen are just this weird, special breed. This is what the article’s really getting into. This one talks about this Tulsa grandmother who goes by the handle gr8mom and really dives into why is she going after parents of Sandy Hook families and continues to believe that all these school shootings are nonsense, and digs into it. It describes a dark triad of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, which is basically you really fundamentally cannot convince them that this is not the way it is. There’s no reasoning with them. They literally just cannot be swayed from the path that they think they’re on. If you point out any inconsistency in their logic, they will “what about” to get to another thing. It wasn’t a hopeful article to be reading, but I think it actually helped me understand more like, oh, they’re actually just psychopaths, really, some of the people who are believing the wildest of these things. As opposed to other people who get sucked into it and they can be talked out of it, there are some people who are just never going to be talked out of this, and maybe we shouldn’t try. Michael: You found some depression I hadn’t even thought about in a while. That’s great. John: Absolute pleasure to have you on the show this week. That’s our program. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Ryan Gerberding. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to [email protected]. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. Michael, are you on Twitter? That’s where I reached out to you the first time. Michael: Yes, @michaelwaldron and on Instagram @fakemichaelwaldron. John: Love it. We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. We have one Loki-inspired T-shirt, which you should check out. Our 10th anniversary T-shirt is Loki-inspired. Our designer Dustin Box did a great job making it feel both like Scriptnotes and like Loki. You can find the show notes to this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. You can sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record about Atlanta. In the meantime, Michael Waldron, thank you so much for coming on Scriptnotes and sharing your history here. Michael: Thanks for having me. It was an honor. I’ll see you after another 555 episodes. John: It’s going to be great. We’ll be living in the future. Michael: Yes, exactly. [Bonus Segment] John: We’re back, and we’re here with Michael Waldron, who is not only a film writer and a TV writer, he is a person who came from Atlanta, who now works in Atlanta. We will all inevitably now work in Atlanta, it seems. Can you give us some tips for… Let’s say I’m a Los Angeles person who is moving to Atlanta for work, to work on a thing. Where should I live in Atlanta? What should I do in Atlanta? Give me an overview of life in Atlanta for a writer. Michael: Right now I think the heat index is 106 degrees, so don’t come. That’s my biggest advice. John: We won’t. Okay, done, won’t come. Michael: It’s great here. It’s been amazing to watch the city become more progressive and grow up as the years have passed. As far as living, the places that you’re going to feel the most like LA, like what you’re used to probably, it’s Inman Park is what you always hear, down south side of the city. Inman Park, Grant Park, Old Fourth Ward. John: What are the Los Angeles equivalents of any of these neighborhoods? What’s the Silver Lake? Michael: Inman Park is like the Silver Lake. It’s like one big Silver Lake. There’s a bunch of different areas around there. That’s probably the place to look at if you’re moving that’ll feel like LA. It’s very walkable. Atlanta’s great. There’s a thing called the BeltLine. It’s a sidewalk. It’s a sidewalk that stretches throughout the entire city. You can walk or bike across the whole city. There’s great restaurants and breweries and all sorts of stuff all around it. Inman Park or anywhere right around there, that’s going to be your best bet. John: If I’m moving to Inman Park, but I’m working on a Marvel property, a Marvel project, how long is my commute to get from where I’m living to- Michael: Marvel, we shoot all our stuff down at… It’s called Trilith Studios now, which is the old Pinewood, which is in Fayetteville, which is… I don’t know, it’s about a half hour with traffic and stuff. If you’re from LA, you’re not going to be daunted by any of the travel times out here, unless there’s a wreck on 85. Then you’ll be like, “What on earth?” John: Like, what choices have you made? Michael: You can get screwed, but it’s nothing. The traffic here, it’s as congested as LA, but somehow you’re always still going 80. It’s like Nascar. Get ready. It’s an intense vehicular experience. John: Now, when I’ve been shooting things in Vancouver or Toronto, one of the things we have to watch for is any line that a local player has to say that has a U sound in it, so no “abouts” and that sort of problem. There are certain lines we’re going to write around certain things. Is there any local casting things you should be aware of if you’re filming something in Atlanta that is not supposed to be in Atlanta? Michael: I’m always delighted with the local casting around here. It’s some real talented folks. What wouldn’t you want? I don’t know, if you can write stuff with Southern accents, you’re going to have an easier time. That’s for sure. John: Now, something like Loki, which obviously had a tremendous amount of set work, you had some real practical exteriors as well in that show, because the main… Or at least the places that weren’t sound stages, like that TVA building. Was that a real building? Michael: The shot of the archives with the elevators coming down, yeah, that’s an old hotel in Atlanta. Everything else was, generally in the TVA, that was a practical set that we built down there at Trilith. That was Kasra Farahani, our brilliant production designer. John: Are people who have to come into Atlanta and leave from Atlanta, are there now direct flights? Are there enough direct flights that you can always get back and forth reliably or are you flying two places now? Michael: It’s so easy out of LA. There’s probably eight or nine flights out of the day. Atlanta, it’s the Delta hub. The airport is massive. You’ll never want to go back to LAX after you’ve been to the Atlanta Airport. Before COVID, they’d added direct Burbank to Atlanta flights, which were really nice, but they were always on planes that felt like they were from the ‘60s. You’d get excited, and you’d take them, and then it was a real like, “I don’t know about this.” You’re normally on a nice airbus if you’re flying Delta to and from LA. It’s pretty easy travel-wise. John: Now today, a lot of productions have moved to Atlanta, obviously. How much post-production on these shows is happening in Atlanta versus other places in the world? Is any writing happening in Atlanta? I feel like maybe Walking Dead maybe did writing in Atlanta. Do you see either writing or more post happening there? Michael: I don’t know. I’m certain there’s got to be post going on here. Maybe, sure, Adult Swim does some of their stuff. None of my shows have posted here. That’s all still LA. Writing-wise, still LA, but maybe in the future. I think that if you were doing something that was very specifically Southern, maybe it would be helpful to immerse yourself in the fast food and the fried catfish and stuff for a couple weeks. John: You as a student who was going to high school and then college in Atlanta, there would’ve been opportunities for you now to be working on sets and doing PA kind of stuff… Michael: Totally. John: …that there wouldn’t have been before. Michael: I was an extra. They were shooting a Revenge of the Nerds reboot that got killed. I got to be an extra in it. I was like, “The movies came to Atlanta. I can’t believe it.” Now it’s everywhere. I think, yeah, if you’re a kid now who loves show business, you can just get out there and do anything, put honey buns in a basket somewhere as a PA, and you’re going to meet people who can help you get that next job. John: This is not a specific Atlanta question, but what’s your instinct on writers’ rooms going back to in person versus staying virtual? What’s the split going to be? Is it mostly going to be in person? Is it mostly going to be virtual? Michael: I guess it’ll be dictated by showrunners. Generally, I think people prefer to work in person. You just get better work. I think about so many of our great ideas come from just the moment, the times after lunch when you’re screwing around. It’s like, “Wouldn’t it be funny if Loki went to Walmart?” and suddenly- John: Then he’s at Walmart, yeah. Michael: That’s not how that came about, by the way. That was just an example. I think it’ll go back to in person, but probably not the five days out of the week grind. Like in anything in show business, there can be a lot of wasted time in a writers’ room. Hopefully, if we go back to in person, we retain the efficiencies that we’ve picked up from doing it on Zoom. Links: Michael Waldron on Twitter and on Instagram Donate blood with the Red Cross #BloodforBreck “Prove to the World You’ve Lost Your Son” by Elizabeth Williamson for Slate from Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt! Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription! Craig Mazin on Twitter John August on Twitter John on Instagram Outro by Ryan Gerberding (send us yours!) Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Email us at [email protected] You can download the episode here.The post Scriptnotes Episode 555: Marveling with Michael Waldron, Transcript first appeared on John August.

The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin. John: And this is Episode 502 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we keep saying it’s important that characters make choices that effect the story, but of course they really don’t. We’ll tackle the problem of free will as it applies to both fictional heroes and real life screenwriters. We’ll also answer listener questions about unready scripts and what happens after an option expires. And in our bonus segment for premium members let’s discuss AP classes. Are they worth it? And what did we actually learn? Craig: Oh, you just put a big old pitch right there. Right down the middle for me. Oh, I’ve been sitting on that fast ball. Here it comes. John: All right. As always what actually is being discussed in an episode is a complete surprise to Craig. He’s not allowed to look at the outline ahead of time. Craig: I mean, I’m allowed to. [laughs] John: So this is all going to be Off-the-Cuff Mazin. Craig: Basically the way it works is I’m like a hostage that gets – somebody puts a bag over my head and takes me somewhere. I don’t know where I am and then the bag comes off and they’re like, “Talk!” That’s how I am on these shows. And you know what? It works. John: Yeah. It’s like improv theater but he’s the only person who has to improv. Craig: Yeah. It’s like I’m an improv artist but I’m working with people that have read a script. It’s very weird. No one else is improving. Just me. I’ve got to figure out how to make it work. And you know what? It does work. John: Yeah. That was probably Robin Williams on many of his films. Craig: Yeah. I’m the Robin Williams of Scriptnotes. John: You are the Robin Williams of the podcast. Craig: Yeah. John: Last week on the show we talked about the Breaker Upperers. And Fred wrote back in who said, “I just heard the episode and I realize I wrote Australia rather than New Zealand.” Craig: Whoa. John: “A perhaps even greater mistake than Craig swapping of Liverpool and Manchester. If possible please relay my sincere apologies to all the New Zealand listeners. In my haste to promote a great, under-seen movie I committed a grave error.” Craig: You know, Fred, it’s OK. And I’ve got to tell you it’s not a greater mistake than the one I made. So, football fans in Liverpool and Manchester are not known for their own calm demeanor and forgiving natures. But everyone I’ve met from New Zealand has been the loveliest person ever. Everyone. It’s not that I’ve met a ton of people from New Zealand, but if you ever go to French Polynesia, for instance, you will run into quite a few Kiwis because it’s pretty close and they can hop over there. And they’re all lovely. Melanie Lynskey, one of the best actors on the planet, from New Zealand. Maybe the nicest person who has ever been born. That’s right. And I’m including Jesus in that. John: Yeah. Former Scriptnotes guest, Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh. Craig: There you go. John: There’s a whole bunch of talented people there. So, and including Taika Waititi who has never been a guest. I should have noticed when I read Fred’s statement on the air that like, wait, it’s Taika Waititi, that’s probably New Zealand and not Australia, but I didn’t question it at that moment. Craig: Right. John: So I regret my part in– Craig: Everyone, it’s going to be OK. Because no one from New Zealand is going to yell at you. That’s what I’m saying. They’re forgiving, wonderful people. John: A second bit of follow up, we talked in the game show segment, so this is a premium segment, so a follow up on a premium segment which I think is fair. I think it’s fair. Craig: We can do that. John: We can do that. One of the questions asked of us like what did we say was the death of screenwriters. And the answer was apparently we said many times on the show that children are the death of screenwriters. I was just reading an article this last week and Seth Rogan pointed out, oh, the reason why I get so much done is I have no kids. And it’s the first time I’d seen a person in the last ten years actually say that out loud. But I want to link to the article about that. Craig: Other than us. John: Other than us. And so sometimes we look at people’s output of work and it’s like, oh, did they have kids/did they not have kids? And in the case of Seth Rogan who is like I don’t have kids, I don’t want kids, and that’s why I get so much done. Craig: I’m glad we’re all talking about it. And this is not anti-kid actually. John: No. I’m pro-kid. Craig: Yeah. We love our children. And anybody that has children, look, so at some point they’re going to make you insane. That’s just a fact. Pete Holmes, the standup comedian Pete Holmes, has this great bit about how when his wife gave birth to their first child they’re in the hospital and all the nurses keep coming by and saying, “By the way, don’t shake the baby,” and there are all these signs like don’t shake a baby. Never shake a baby. And they’re like who shakes a baby? And he goes what they don’t tell you is you’re going to want to shake that baby. And it’s true. It’s really, really true. But it’s something that’s so impactful in your life that it is beyond the concept of regret. It is sort of life-changing and wonderful. But it definitely – it will reduce your output. That’s OK. I think it’s a perfect tradeoff. John: Absolutely. Craig: Output and productivity are not the judge of a great life. John: Yeah. So I just wanted to sort of point this out to acknowledge that like if you are going to have kids you’re going to take a hit in your productivity and that’s just actually fine and normal. And I think if we don’t talk about that then people might say like, oh, I used to be so much better, what happened. And it’s like what happened is you had kids. And so it’s something that every writer goes through when they have a new life in their house. Craig: Yeah. We should acknowledge it impacts women more than men. John: Yeah. Craig: Yet it doesn’t not impact men. John: It’s true. Also in the news this week, everybody is merging. So, Warners and Discovery. They’re going to be combined together. So Discovery is HGTV and Discovery Network and Food Network. A bunch of other what we used to think of as cable channels but are of course just slices of reality programming. They’re going to be merging together. And it looks like Amazon and MGM are also going to combine. So, really Amazon is going to swallow up MGM. Craig: That one is really something else. I got an email earlier this week from Casey Bloys who runs HBO and it basically said, “Hey, just so you know, nothing is going to change in terms of what we’re doing together and everything is cool. Just business as usual. Don’t worry about it.” And I was like, great. What’s he talking about? [laughs] I had no idea what he was talking about. And so I looked online and then I tried to understand what happened. And I must admit the concept of a corporate spinoff is not necessarily something I have a great grasp on. But what I could get was that AT&T sold Warner Bros, the whole Warner Bros conglomeration to Discovery but also still owns most of it. I don’t understand. They own like 70% but Discovery is in charge of it? Maybe that’s what it means? John: Well I think it’s just like if they both extended pseudo pods towards each other and the pseudo pods merged together to form a bigger blob of a company. Craig: I see. John: That is better positioned to take on Disney. Craig: I don’t see at all. [laughs] I don’t understand. John: I think it’s also interesting because the guy who is running Discovery will probably end up running this whole new thing. And even as you said, oh, that’s right you’re making a show for HBO, which is Warners. And I’m making a movie for Warners. And so it’s weird that the Discovery guy is going to ultimately have an impact on sort of both of our lives, which is just weird. And the way that everything is streaming now, it doesn’t matter that I’m making a theatrical movie and you’re making a TV series. It’s kind of all the same. Craig: Well, this seems like a great time to point out how wonderful the guy who runs Discovery is and how much I admire him, or her, and think they’re just beautiful, and handsome, and kind. And don’t take any money out of our budget please. That’s all I’m really asking here. John: Not a bit. Craig: Leave our budget alone. John: What if it turns out that the guy who runs Discovery actually just hates videogames and hates anything post-apocalyptic? Craig: He’s in a weird business. I mean, the Discovery Channel definitely loves everything. John: Yeah. Craig: I don’t know what impact – I suspect that I have always been shielded, like a child, from all of the corporate shenanigans that go on. And so I will never sense what they are in this case either. But the Amazon/MGM thing is startling. Because Discovery has been in business on television for many, many years. Amazon is purely an Internet company and now they own the oldest, I guess, even if it’s not technically old, it feels like the oldest film company in our business. This historic Hollywood studio that lately – and when I say lately I mean in the last 20 years – was really more of just a distribution channel for James Bond movies and not much else. John: And Creed. But yeah. Rocky. Craig: And Rocky. It had things it did, but mostly it was kind of living off of the library. And it is kind of startling that the lion going roar is now owned by Amazon. John: Yeah. So in my time in Hollywood it’s always been a thing with MGM is like who owns the MGM library. The asset was really the MGM library which would keep getting shuttled around from place, to place, to place. I have no idea what MGM actually owns of their library at this point. Amazon gets the Bond movie. They get other things and potential things they can remake. And again it’s always about streaming. So they get more stuff for Amazon Prime Video which is how they make their money in the entertainment industry. Craig: And how – so MGM released Wizard of Oz. John: Yes. Craig: But Wizard of Oz is controlled by Warner Bros because of some strange real estate transaction that occurred in the ‘80s I believe. John: Yeah. I’m not sure how that all happened. But it has done very well by me, so I’m happy it happened. Craig: Yeah. I feel like Warner Bros owned some sort of bit of real estate that Columbia – remember the whole thing when Sony bought Columbia and then they put those two guys in charge and it was a train wreck? And one of the things they did was try and get back some real estate from Warner Bros and trade it at MGM. Something crazy happened. I don’t understand it. This episode should be called Craig Doesn’t Know How Business Works. John: But at some point we should talk about LA real estate and the entertainment industry because it is so fascinating how much LA has been shaped by where those studios were placed originally and how the failure of Cleopatra is why we have Century City. Craig: That’s right. And furthermore a studio that no longer exists like Fox, because Fox was purchased by Disney and is controlled by Disney mostly, that – my guess is that the real estate– John: Oh my god. Worth so much. Craig: Is worth more than Fox. That’s really the big prize there is the land. Because you can put at this point now soundstages – people just stick them out wherever. Like Santa Clarita, which is about an hour north of where you live, they got a whole bunch of soundstages up there because land is cheap. But Paramount and Fox and Sony, that land is invaluable. John: Yeah. So at some point we’ll bring somebody on who can tell us about the actual history of the land in Los Angeles and how the studios shaped it. It feels a little bit more like some other person’s podcast, but we can do it. Craig: You know what? It probably is. Maybe we’ll go on their show. John: Yeah, that’s what we’ll do. Craig: I’ll be just as unprepared. John: All right. I want to talk about free will. And so the reason that this came up in my brain– Craig: Do you want to talk about free will or do you have to talk about free will? John: That’s really the question. Was it always predestined that we were going to talk about free will in this episode and that you’d be 15 minutes late because you confronted by production concerns? What got me thinking about it was this article I read by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian and it’s really looking at this issue that philosophers have been grappling from the very start and now increasingly because of modern science they realized like, oh, you know what, free will probably is not quite what we think it is. And by free will let’s talk about sort of defining our terms. Free will being the ability for a person to make their own choices. To have agency. To decide what they’re going to do. That they’re not being forced to do a thing. The problem comes from our understanding of physics and science these days is that things don’t just happen kind of spontaneously. There’s always a past event that sort of anticipated what’s happening next. And there’s just the billiard balls banging through the universe, except on a very small quantum level you can kind of always predict what’s going to happen. Craig: Right. This is one of those great college chats. I sometimes think that it’s a bit of a pointless discussion because in the end we don’t know and we can’t know. But I side generally with the people who say we do not have free will as we understand free will. Because I literally don’t understand how free will could possibly exist. John: Yeah. Where you are an independent agent who at this moment can make any choice you want to make because there’s nothing behind that. Craig: Well, right, because I don’t understand how choices can be made without precursors. And we are nothing – I mean, when we try and analyze what consciousness is we really stumble around in the dark because we’re asking a microscope to stare at itself. So, just observer error is baked in. And we want to believe we have free will because we’re experiencing it, but that doesn’t mean it’s correct. The fact that there are optical illusions should tell us everything we need to know about the accuracy of our brains. John: Yeah. So there’s different levels of sort of how much people believe in free will on a philosophical level. And there’s people who truly think that we can do anything at any point. They’re kind of falling out of favor because that’s clearly not the case. Craig: Right. John: There are strict determinists who say, no, literally you are on rails this entire time. You are not making any choices. And then there’s some compatibilism which is basically yes but it’s also – you can say that free will is an illusion, but it’s a common illusion to a lot of our other experiences. And like consciousness is an illusion. We recognize that what we experience from the outside world is not really the outside world. And that we are constantly living in this – it’s not even a simulation, it’s just like we are trying to synthetize a bunch of outside forces and it’s not really what’s happening outside of us. Craig: Correct. The world that we see is not the world at all. John: So that’s the struggle for us in the real world, but let’s talk about it in terms of people who really have no choice which are the characters in the stories we write, which is really what I want to focus on today. Because one of the struggles we have as screenwriters is we want to create characters who feel like they are making valid choices. That they are in a real world and that their choices have impact. But of course as creators we know they really don’t because we are limiting the choices they could make. We are basically making the choices for them and trying to make it seem like they’re making their own choices themselves. It’s like a very talented sleight of hand magician who says like pick a card, any card, but of course they are forcing you to take a specific card. Craig: That’s exactly what we’re doing. It is that principle of magic. We are forcing cards. So, the trick to a lot of magic is convincing people that they are really choosing from a bunch of things. And that is what we do with our characters. We need the audience to believe, and we have to give the audience evidence that our characters have real choices to make. And that means we have to bait those traps. We have to make them tempting. We have to make them reasonable. We have to allow the audience to experience a kinship with the character so they imagine themselves in that position and can feel what it’s like to be torn between two options. Even as the audience understands which of those will be chosen. And that’s the fascinating part to me. We know what they’re going to do. We know what they’re going to choose in certain genres. But we still feel like maybe they won’t. John: All right. Let’s zoom back and take a look at creating a story when we’re at sort of the whiteboard stage of the index card stage. And we need to make it feel like our protagonists are actually making choices that impact the world. And what are some of the things we’re going to do to set that character up for success and make it feel like they are making choices that are valid. We talk a lot about where is this character coming from, what is the origin, what do they want. Really we’re kind of trying to decide what is a want to give that character that will help drive the story. Craig: Yeah. And so the want generates a single sort of choice that you would imagine, right? I want that guy. So I just want to choose a guy. But then what do we have to do as screenwriters, we have to fire all of these other choices at that person to muddle their minds. We have to distract them. We have to pull them off the path. There is of many, many Thief of Baghdad remakes there was one – I talk about this all the time. I just, maybe I’m wrong, maybe it wasn’t the Thief of Baghdad, but it was definitely a movie where there was a treasure cave and they had to go get something at the end of the treasure cave, it was the best treasure of them all. And the trick was you have to stay on the path to that treasure. But the cave would show you illusions on either side of the path and if you fell into that temptation and stepped off the path you would turn to stone. And so the place was full of treasure and statues. John: Yeah. Aladdin has a similar kind of thing in the Cave of Wonders. Craig: There you go. And so this is our job is if the choice is simple, I want that guy, then my job as a screenwriter is to show you different guys. My job is also to have somebody lie to you about the guy you want so that you don’t want that guy. This is what we do. We confuse and muddle and therefore create frustration in the audience. That frustration will ultimately be released. We want to see, just like when we go to a magic show we want to see the magician succeed. Also we want to see them fail. So it’s like they have to give us the sense that they are really struggling. That’s part of the showmanship. So that when they finally do pull it out you’re like, “Yes!” John: Now, what you’re describing in terms of throwing other choices at that character and other options is valid, but if we just did that then it would seem like – you’d feel the heavy hand of the writer. Craig: Yes. John: Because you’d feel like, oh, all this stuff is being thrown at them and they’re not actually proactively making choices. And so you’re also doing this thing where you’re looking at it from their point of view and it’s like, OK, what are reasonable things that that character could do in this moment? If they have their overall goal of getting that guy, what are their next strategies? What are their next tactics for what are they going to do next? And so you’re trying to balance this like what is their overall thing, what would they actually realistically do next. And how do you set up those next choices in a way that moves your story forward but also feels valid for the characters, so it doesn’t feel like that character is just on rails. Craig: And in this sense we are creating a maze. And there are lots of different ways to get to the end of the maze. It’s a very good thing as a screenwriter to lead your character into a place where you’re not quite sure how they’re going to get back towards where they’re going. You allow three different doors and you imply that only one door is accurate or good, and the other two are doomed. But you know of course they’re not. As a DM when I’m DMing and you guys are playing you’re not on rails. You can do anything. And I know that I have to get you from A to B. Everything that happens in between A and B can be as squiggly and as backwards moving as we want. Moving away from things. Being inefficient in your path. These are all ways that we create the illusion of free will. Especially when a character is choosing something that clearly is not going to move them toward their goal. John: Absolutely. So D&D is essentially a conversation. Yes, you may have a map that you’re looking at, but it’s essentially a conversation about what choices are our player characters going to make. But I’m thinking back to fantasy videogames and so often you recognize that it feels like you can go anywhere. And really you can at any moment. I could go over there, go in this direction. But if you actually look at level design those levels are designed in very clever ways that like, OK, there really is one path through this. And it looks like you could go anywhere, but ultimately you’re going to go one way through. So how things are sloped, where you can walk, where you can’t walk, what doors are open, what doors are not open. There is generally a linear path through that and careful level design makes it feel like you don’t sort of see the path, but it’s just there. And that really is what we’re talking about in terms of the whiteboard stage of a movie is that you’re doing level design. So there’s really one path the character is going to take through the story, and yet they’re not aware of it, and the audience is not aware that they were locked to that path. Craig: And we can mess with the path. We can create gates. And in stories if it seems like there’s too direct of a path towards what the character will want through their will then you put a gate up. And the gate swings on a test. So, if you need to get – if you want that job and we say like if you work hard you get the job, well just work hard. Work hard for five minutes and you’ll get the job. In the movie it doesn’t work that way. The problem is there is a gate and that’s the person who already has the job. Now, what do we do to move that person out of the job? And in D&D there may be a real simple, boring path that would cheat you guys of the story. And usually there’s a gate. There’s something that’s blocking you. And sometimes there isn’t. And sometimes you actually can just sort of go really fast and usually if you get through something really fast you should feel a sinking sense that perhaps you should not have wished for this. That there is something even worse – there is a punishment for essentially not having to work for what you want. It’s punishing you for not exercising enough free will or enough illusion of free will. John: Yeah. So let’s talk about those gates or really decision points, decision tree points, and it’s making sure that when a character hits one of those moments it really does feel like a choice. That the choice was not so predestined that like, well, of course they’re going to take this way. That there actually are pros and cons to both things. And there’s a cost to taking either version. And that’s something you do hopefully think about on the whiteboard version, but really as you get into scenes that’s where you have to be clever about how you’re communicating what the choice really is. And so that we actually see that character making the choice. It may not be dialogue. It may literally be they can pursue her or not pursue her, or decide what they’re going to do. But we need to believe they actually could decide not to do that thing. And most times we’re going to want them to take an action versus not take an action, because we want to see characters actively engaging in their environment. But, we have to believe they could just sit there. Craig: Yes. And we can also emphasize the character’s inherent misperception of reality. It makes us feel like they have free will when they make a choice and within a scene they realize that they had misunderstood even what the choices were and therefore they reverse course and make a different choice. Or they stop in their path and question whether or not they should continue. Those kinds of things, those confusions, begin to mimic the way we move through real life. We may think we have free will because when we start the day we literally don’t know what’s going to happen next. We have some theories. And our characters have theories. It’s important to give a character a theory. John: Yeah. Craig: When they go into a scene they should have a theory of how it should go. An expectation. And then our job as screenwriters is to either reinforce that expectation so much that the character becomes paranoid that people are messing with them, or subvert the expectation in some way so the character has to figure out what to do next. Otherwise, you just end up with a boring day at the office. John: Absolutely. So we want characters to have some sort of agenda. Basically you say expectation. Agenda would be a more proactive way of like this is how they see these things going. And we get to mess with them and interrupt their agenda. But just as important that we believe the protagonists are capable of making their own choices. We want to believe that the people surrounding the protagonists also have free will. That they actually could do things and they’re not just there to service that protagonist. And when I see bad writing I often encounter characters, I don’t believe that they’re real because I don’t think they would do that thing that is just there to help our story. That it’s just there to provide an obstacle or provide support to our protagonist. You want to write these characters in a way that makes it feel like they could have not done that. They could have gone somewhere else. They didn’t have to say that thing. And that’s one of the trickiest things to do in scene work sometimes is that you’re trying to make the scene efficient and also feel real and reality is not efficient. Craig: Correct. Reality is a big old mess. And it’s confusing. If we think about The Matrix which is about free will as much as it is about anything, one way of looking at that movie is to think of the Oracle character as the Wachowskis. The Oracle is the screenwriter. If I put myself in a movie, me, Craig, as the writer in a movie that I’m writing and I’m sitting there and a character walks in I know everything. I know what’s happened. And I know what’s going to happen. Also, I have total confidence that if that character says, “Am I the one?” And I say, “Uh, you’re not, sorry.” That they’re going to believe me and that that’s what they needed to hear. But I also know that that’s going to lead to them being free to do certain things because they no longer have the burden of feeling like they’re the one, so they’re going to start to do things, and thus they will be the one which they must be because I’ve written it. And that’s the fun of that investigation. That you say to somebody, “You see this world you’re living in? You don’t have free will in this world. You’re actually part of a massive computer simulation,” which we all are anyway. “We’re going to show you the real world.” Except when you’re in the real world you’re also in a simulation. You’re in a freaking movie. And that’s the fun of it is that once you envelope people in the quirkiness and the backwards motion and the confusion they forget that it’s entirely determined. The people with the least free will are the people we write. We literally chose everything for them. But it seems like they’re doing it. Isn’t that fun? John: It is fun. And so we are creating these characters. We’re doing these things that we’re telling them to do. And it’s being played by actors who are reciting the lines that we wrote for them and having the whole scene being controlled by a director who is following our script but also following their own instincts. So, there’s so many levels of unreality being forced upon this. And the fact that we can watch these stories and sort of believe and sort of accept them as being real is a testament to craft and our brains and sort of how art works. Basically even recognize that you’re seeing a simulation, you enjoy the simulation and it feels real to you because you can imagine yourself being in that situation. Craig: Yeah. And when you’re writing these things, if you can try and surprise yourself then the odds are that the illusion of free choice/free will will be stronger. And of course we can’t really surprise ourselves because, again, it’s all determined. But if it feels like in your mind things are sort of unfolding in a fairly obvious, pat way, just try and throw something at it. See if you can – just surprise yourself. What would this person do that would be entirely unexpected? Particularly if it feels like the scene you’re writing is something you’ve seen, or felt a lot. What do you do to make it different? And that will help also. Because if you’re watching something and you think, oh, I’ve seen this scene quite a few times, the free will of it all kind of gets exploded. You just – it’s gone. Because those people are just copies. John: Yeah. You’re watching a magic trick that you already know how the magic trick works because you’ve seen it a zillion times and it’s just not interesting anymore. There’s no surprise. Even if it’s really efficiently done, I can only see that magic trick a certain number of times to say like I don’t quite know how that magic trick works, but I know it’s a thing, and it’s just not interesting to me anymore. Craig: Exactly. John: All right. So, in no part of our conversation about free will have we talked about three-act-structure and hitting plot points and how movies are supposed to work. And how official guidelines for sort of how things should be structured. And that’s sort of by design because I feel like structure as you often read in screenwriting books feels like it’s just – like here’s how you build the rails to sort of bring a character through a movie. This is how movies work. Put them on this track. And we’re arguing against that. Yes, there probably is going to be a track and you’re going to build that track. But if you just are using somebody else’s track it’s not going to work. It’s not going to feel real. Craig: Yeah. Those things are, as I’ve said, I think I said in my How to Write a Movie episode, those things are post-mortems. They are not guides for creating new life. They are simply excellent – sometimes – excellent analyses of dead bodies. They are things that already happened. They’re taking them apart and showing you, look, this connects to this and this connects to this. Has no relation to creation as far as I’m concerned. None. And if you follow those things you will have something that looks kind of like a person, or it seems kind of like a movie, but really it’s just a boring kind of copy of stuff. John: Yeah. Now, you may have started your interest in screenwriting by reading one of those books and at this point you may be questioning like, wow, do I even want to be a screenwriter, because what John and Craig are saying feels kind of unapproachable and sort of just how am I supposed to do all of these things at once. And I want to segue our conversation from looking at free will for characters to free will for screenwriters. Because a thing I think we don’t talk about enough on the show is it’s OK to not be a screenwriter. Craig: Yeah. John: And I’m reading this book by Adam Grant called Think Again. And one of the points he makes in the book is that so often people pick a career, pick an interest, and sort of like double down on that interest without ever giving themselves permission to sort of question whether like, wow, is this even a thing I really like? Craig: Yeah. John: And I think we need to give people more permission to say like you can enjoy us talking about screenwriting. It’s absolutely fine if you don’t want to be a screenwriter yourself at all. Or never write a scene. That’s OK. Craig: 100%. And similarly it’s OK if you are a screenwriter and want to stop. John: Yup. Craig: Dennis Palumbo who was with us on Episode 99 – feels like we’re due to have him back, right? John: We should. Craig: Oscar-nominated screenwriter. And now therapist. And he’s been a therapist for many, many years. And one of the areas of his practice is aside from helping writers navigate through their lives, he also specializes in mid-life career changes, which can be traumatic for people because it violates this concept we have vocation. Vocation as in a calling. You are called by some higher power to do something. And then at some point you realize, wait, I don’t like it that much. Or, I don’t know if I’m actually that good at this. Or, I’m good at it, and I like it, but I want to try something new. All of these things can be very disruptive and it’s OK to go through that process of disrupting these things. If you are pursuing the path of being a screenwriter and it’s not going anywhere you are bombarded with these messages of “don’t quit.” Don’t be a quitter. And persistence. That’s the key is persistence. John: That’s what it is. Yeah. Craig: I don’t know if persistence is the key. I’ve got to be honest. I don’t know if it is. John: Yeah. There’s a concept that’s in Adam Grant’s book, I don’t know if he created it or if he pulled it from someplace else called Identity Foreclosure. And that’s when you fixate on one vision of yourself, or who you’ll become to the exclusion of all other ones. Craig: That’s great. John: And it’s a thing that I see happening a lot in my daughter. Our kids are 15/16 and they get really – they go through phases where it’s like I’m going to be a rocket scientist. I’m going to be this. I’m going to be – and it’s so completely natural, but so unhelpful because it’s not asking the right question. It’s not asking the question like what are you really interested in. It’s thinking like, oh, I will do this job because then I’ll be this and I’ll make this much money and then I will be happy. And ultimately they’re getting to like they want to feel satisfied and happy and secure but they’re focusing on the job rather than what they actually would want to be doing on a daily basis. Craig: And this is not new. John: No. Craig: When you and I were children they called it an Identity Crisis and I was always told teenagers go through identity crises where they are like who am I and what am I supposed to be. And I always felt like what a strange question who am I. I’m me. What other options are there? But there is this desire to define yourself because if you do it’s like I’m finished. I’m completed. I no longer have to feel like I’m free falling or failing at things or grasping for who I am. It’s so much simpler to just say I am blank. This identity foreclosure has extended beyond just the notion of career. It’s also extending to notions of who we are in terms of our gender and in terms of our sexuality. I see my child’s generation grasping to immediately foreclose their identity because they can, whereas it used to be you couldn’t. And now you can. So this is a new area where they’re sort of like clamping down and at 15 saying I am this, or I am that. And, of course, humans are, A, more fluid than that, and B, you’re still pretty young. So I think for a lot of people things are super clear because they are, and they’re factual. And for other people they’re still figuring it out. But the notion of foreclosing the possibilities is fascinating. I think that’s exactly right. And it’s a great thing to urge people to, as we would say to our son all the time, you have to sit in the discomfort of uncertainty. And that is very hard for people. It’s hard for a lot of people, especially if they’re neuro-atypical. But it’s hard for all of us to sit with the discomfort of uncertainty. John: One of the things that can be helpful is to really plan for an audit. Basically twice a year to sit down and say, OK, what am I doing? Do I like what I’m doing? Is there something else I might enjoy more? And doing that might actually help you think rather than giving up something, like oh, I’m going to give up trying to be a screenwriter or give up trying to be a basketball player. Really think about affirmatively choosing something else you want to try. And not to think about it as a thing you’re going to be, but a thing you want to do. Because you can’t change – on many levels you can’t change who you are, but you can change what you’re actually doing on a daily basis, overall sort of what your activities are. And really think about it that way. And so if you were to decide I’m not enjoying screenwriting, or I don’t think screenwriting is the thing for me, great. But if you can phrase that in terms of like I want to spend the time I used to be thinking about screenwriting in this other thing that I am more interested in, that’s great. To affirmatively choose something else rather than giving something up can be a useful way of making those tough choices. Craig: And I think also it’s helpful, although scary, to admit that you are not in control. That the choices you make about yourself, the theories of what you think you want are not always accurate because, again, no free will. And that the world will collide with you in ways you cannot imagine and you cannot predict. And when that happens things change. And they change dramatically. When you look back at your own life, which you and I can now do and actually see five decades, man– John: A lot happened. Craig: Yeah. It certainly wasn’t planned. And you have to be ready for those things. I think the saddest thing that could happens is if you are so rigid in your identity foreclosure out of fear of uncertainty that when a collision occurs you do not allow it to change you, or you do not allow yourself to adapt and consider reforming your relationship with the world and reality because of what just occurred. That’s sad. John: This is advice that’s been given a zillion times on this podcast, but it can be helpful to think of yourself as the protagonist in the story of your life. And so if you think about sort of you as that central character and the choices you get to make, maybe it’s time to pull out the whiteboard a little bit and say like, OK, where am I going? What is the story I’d like to be on? And that story you’re on may not be sort of where you’re at and think about sort of how might want to get to the story of the heroic journey that you’d prefer to be on. It feels like a time to be doing that. Craig: Yeah. And just like we, screenwriters, when we throw things at characters we do it so they react. John: Yeah. Craig: I mean, if you throw a bunch of stuff at a character and they never react and they just keep turning away for 90 minutes, boo. John: Not good. Craig: Don’t be that boring character. John: All right. It’s time for our listener questions. But before we get to our listener questions I’m curious, Megana Rao, our producer, does any of this spark for you? Because you’re a person who changed careers. You started at Google and then you came over to work for us here. Does this resonate for you at all? Megana Rao: Yeah. Something that I was also thinking about as you guys were talking is that no matter how much you research or job shadow it’s really hard to know what the reality of a certain experience is going to be like before you try it. Maybe you love film. You love screenwriting. And you love the craft of it all. But the weight that comes along with the industry of Hollywood is unappealing to the point that it outweighs your passion. I mean, you just couldn’t have known that until you put yourself in that position. And I think about all the identities that I foreclosed on before I could pursue this dream and looking back I can thread together the aspects and how I got here. You know, I thought I was going to be a doctor, and then I thought I would work in tech for the rest of my life. And those were really difficult paths to turn away from because all of these external signals were validating my choices. But ultimately it wasn’t right for me and I don’t know how I could have come to those conclusions until I explored them as options. So, I would just say that trying – the act of pursuing something and putting yourself out there is really hard and if you realize it’s not quite right, congratulations for trying, and have some grace for yourself as you figure out what you want to do next. Craig: That is really interesting. Particularly the doctor part, because you and I are basically the same person. And I was in the same spot. And I’m wondering, Megana, if you had the same feeling I did. Because I didn’t – I liked medicine. I liked the notion of it. And a lot of it still fascinates me to this day. But did you have a moment where you suddenly just thought “I’m not like those people and I don’t know why?” What was the moment where you realized, ooh, I think I should be doing something else? Megana: That’s interesting. I feel like in the question of free will I never felt like I had free will because everyone I knew was basically a doctor. John: Having read your script, you’re also the child of immigrant doctors. Megana: Exactly. Exactly. Craig: Yes. John: So no free will for you. Craig: No. No free will for all the little Indian and Jewish children. That’s just how it is. Megana: But the thing that I was interested in being a doctor was just people’s stories and talking to them. And when I think about how my dad is as a doctor I was like, oh OK, that is a very different approach to what this field actually is like. And the science aspect of it, like I like science and I think it’s cool, but it was never like oh that is what gets me going in the morning. Craig: Right. So you were on a path and one day you realized I don’t have to be on this path. Megana: Yeah. And I think I also realized I think in some ways I’m too sensitive to be a doctor. Because you have to be able to detach a little bit. And I’m not very good at that. John: Yeah. Because all it takes is one “yup” from me and you’re questioning all your choices. [laughs] Craig: This is why I think Megana you would have been a brilliant pathologist because they’re already dead. John: Let’s see if we can help some of our listeners out with questions they have. Megana, can you start us off? Megana: All right. So Jamie in Maryland asks, “I’ve had a situation come up a few times that I’ve never really gotten clarity on. I’ve had scripts optioned and been hired to rewrite. The complication arises when that script falls out of the option period but it’s been rewritten, and in most cases by me. Going forward, now that the material is back in my hands what do I own? And I don’t own the rewrite work how can I possibly forget improvements I may have made? Or what if I get similar notes from a producer who options the script in the future? “I can’t really say, no, the old company owns that. What are the rules for dealing with this?” John: This is a really good question. And Craig and I, we don’t write a lot of specs, and so we’ve not had this happen where we’ve optioned stuff out. So I ended up asking a lawyer friend about who deals with this a lot. And it’s actually more complicated than I would have guessed. Let’s first start by talking about what an option is. Craig, can you remind us what an option is? Craig: Well, an option is a payment to you, the writer, that says that producer who pays you the option has the exclusive right to arrange for the sale of that script to a studio and there’s a baked in price usually for what the price will be. And it lasts for about a year or so. And they give you some money for it. It could a dollar. It could be a lot. It’s not like a WGA thing because we haven’t been employed. And then when that time is over the option ends. John: And so in a vacuum you would get that script and it’s exactly the same script that you optioned to them, and so you still control copyright and it’s just entirely yours. Now the complication is generally they’ll option that script but then they will hire you, probably under a WGA contact, as a work-for-hire to do some rewriting work on that script. And that’s where it gets complicated. So let’s say you make some changes to the script and improve it. And the option lapses. You get your original script back, but you don’t automatically get all the rewrites that you did back. And so if there’s things you changed that are not part of that, that is still owned by them, because they own that copyright on those rewrites because of work-for-hire. So, it does happen some and here’s the advice I got from my lawyer friend on this situation. In your initial contract for the rewriting you could have had a clause in there saying that you get the rewrites back or for a certain fee at the end of this. That’s a thing that could happen. More likely what’s going to happen is as the option lapses, and if you do want that stuff, you talk to them. And they may ask for all that money that they gave you for the rewrite back. They may ask for some percentage of that. More often what happens is that when you go to set something up someplace else, like you’re going to sell this script to someplace else, you then negotiate to sort of get that stuff back in. Or you put it as part of a – if you’re selling it to someplace else in that contract to sell it to this second company at the start of production there’s a payment made to the first place to get all that stuff back. Here’s why you do that. Is because you can say like, oh, well yes, you had that idea to make those changes, but I also had that idea to make the changes and I did it slightly differently. It’s still copyright law and it’s still very clear that you had access to all the material. So, you could be in a lawsuit situation. Rarely. But it could happen. Craig: Yeah. So, Jamie, the inflection point here is when you say hired to rewrite. You get hired. It’s a work-for-hire. So the person that’s hired you to rewrite, the person that optioned the script now owns that rewrite. They own it. They’re the writer. They are the legal author of that. So, you can’t really undo that. Writing screenplays and developing screenplays is like cooking. So you should them a dish and they’re like, great, now I’m going to pay you money to take that and turn it into a stew. And you do. How do you un-stew a stew? It’s really not possible. You can go somewhere else and say I’ve made something new. It’s not the first thing I showed them, it’s something in between this and a stew. And then the people who own the stew are like, uh, you got stew elements in that. So, my advice if at all possible is to not get paid to rewrite an optioned script. That sounds a little crazy, but hear me out. Your script is optioned. That means you own the copyright. They just have the exclusive right to shop it. Hold on. And if they want a rewrite, if they’re giving you advice on how to make it better and you agree, just say great, I’m going to do that on my own. And you can option that. But don’t give me money and employ me to do it. Because the most important thing you can have when a studio is interested in your script is ownership of it. And I can’t imagine the amount of money that they’re giving you to rewrite is as significant as the amount of money a studio will pay if they really want that script. So if you can try and keep copyright all the way through until a real studio wants it. And then you give it away. John: So, the con to that is that there may be reasons why, A, you need that money, or that money may actually get you into the WGA, or sort of keep you active in the WGA. Craig: Yes. Yes. John: So, there may be reasons to take that deal. Craig: Yes. John: But I agree with Craig in that if it’s sort of a shopping agreement, if you keep control over everything that’s kind of ideal. Ultimately what we’re talking about is how did the option lapse. What is the end of that relationship like? And if the end of that relationship is good, and they want to still keep working with you on other stuff you’re going to have a better negotiating what you’re going to do with the rewrite stuff you did for them before. And really the best case scenario might be just a lien against that script for – if it goes into production they’ll pay you whatever money that was owed. Craig: Right. John: That’s fine and that’s reasonable. But it’s a good question to ask and I agree with Craig that if you’ve written this material and you can control this material it’s generally worth it to keep control for as long as you can. Craig: Agreed. John: Cool. Megana, what you got next for us? Megana: All right. Maya asks, “I’m an up and coming writer that just got out of grad school. My program sent out loglines to industry folks and a manager who is now interested in reading my script. Problem is, it’s not ready. How much time do I have? Is it a bad look if I send in my script after a month of them asking for it? I just want to make the best first impression possible and I know that if I send my script right now that first impression is going down the drain. “Should I let them know I need more time and expect my script in a month? Or should I just not reply until my script is ready? What I’m trying to ask, is there any leniency in this process or am I basically screwed?” Craig: Aw. John: I like that Maya’s default position is everything is terrible. Maya, you’re not screwed. Craig: No. John: My instinct is to send an email and say like, oh my god, I’m so excited you want to read this script. I’m in the middle of a rewrite on it now and I can’t wait to show you the next version. Craig: This is one of those areas where if you could only imagine how little other people are thinking about you it would blow your mind. John: Yes. Craig: You know, like someone is like, huh, that’s an interesting logline. I’m interested in reading that. That’s literally all it is. Then they forget. They move on. Now the next thing they’re worried about is lunch. And what they’re not doing every day is waking up going, “Where the hell is Maya’s script? Where is it? I said I wanted it. Where is it?” And similarly if you send kind of along Hamlet-like email, like I’m so sorry, I do, but I don’t, but I don’t know. They’re going to be like, “What? What are you talking about man? Also, who is this?” It doesn’t matter. Here’s what matters. You’re going to send a script and they’re going to read it and they’re going to either like it or they don’t. A logline means nothing. I think we’ve said that a billion times on this show. You’ve certainly intrigued them with the idea. What they’re really saying is if that script is good that would be good. As opposed to if that script is good I still wouldn’t care because I don’t want anything about that topic. So, there is no reason for you to rush something out that you don’t think is ready. Nor is there any reason for you to fret or sweat or freak out every day that you’re taking too long because they’re sitting there tapping their fingers on the table going, “It’s Maya o’clock. Where’s my script?” Just relax your body, you know, waggle your head around. Take some deep breaths. Don’t tell them you need more time or anything like that. Just send the script. And when you do say, “You might remember that you were interested in this logline. Here’s the script.” And then they’ll go like, oh yeah. Oh yeah. That’s it. Simple as that. John: So my argument for sending the email now is, again, to be very, very short but saying like, hey, I’m so excited for you to read this. I’m doing a rewrite. I’m going to send it to you. It might remind them that like, oh, that’s right, I did read that thing. So that when they get it a month from now they’ll remember sort of what it was. Craig: Sure. That seems reasonable. John: But it should be nothing more than that. And you should not fret about it. But also I think sending that email will light a little fire under you to actually really get that work done. Because nothing helps a writer more than having promised it to somebody. Craig: I think that’s true. You have a certain accountability. Yes, you can send a little short email that’s just like, great, thanks so much. I will send you the script as soon as it’s finished. John: Yeah. One more question, Megana. What do you got for us? Megana: OK, Bill from Dallas asks, “I have a question about child screenwriting prodigies, specifically where the heck are they? We’ve got pre-teen violinists who can play with professional skill, young mathematicians who can solve problems at graduate college levels. And of course plenty of chess prodigies. So where are the screenwriters? Where is that 10-year-old kid topping the Black List and clinking glasses with the finalists of Nicholls? Are we just not finding them? Or are there really zero out there? If the latter is true, why?” John: So I’m going to find this Ben Stiller sketch from The Ben Stiller Show a zillion years ago where they had this young child prodigy director. And the line I remember from it is, “My movie is called Horses are Pretty because horses are pretty.” And it’s great. I don’t know why there are not more teenage filmmaker prodigies except that maybe there are prodigies and they’re making TikToks and YouTube videos that are stunning but they’re just not writing screenplays. Craig: There aren’t really novelists prodigies either. John: True. Craig: I think it may be because writing fiction is harder than all the rest of this stuff. Now, I can already hear people going, “What?” Because, you know, that’s pretty braggy. Like a bunch of guys writing movies about cars smashing into each other and people over there with Fields medals in math are like, “Are you serious? I’m unraveling the fabric of the universe and you think what you’re doing is harder?” It’s not harder, it’s rarer. How about that? There are actually fewer working, consistently working, impactful screenwriters than there are mathematicians like that. It’s crazy. I don’t know why. It’s weird. It’s not harder. It can’t be harder. It’s not harder than chess. I’m so bad at chess. John, do you understand how bad I am at chess? John: I believe that you’re bad at chess because I’m bad at chess, too. And I’m smart enough person. I understand how it all works. But I’m just not good at it. My daughter beats me regularly. Craig: Anyone could beat me. I think my dog could beat me. Yeah. But, I don’t know, it’s rare. It just is. And it may be that the neurological components required for writing well, whatever that means, just take way more time. And require way more integration. So, all of the parts of your brain need to be working. And working at a certain level. As opposed to one part that’s just skyrocketing early. John: I think to Amanda Gorman who wrote the amazing poem that was read at the inauguration. And she’s young. She’s not necessarily that young. She’s not a teen prodigy necessarily, but she’s really, really good. But poetry is also a shorter form. And one of the challenges of a screenplay is it’s 100 plus pages and that’s just a lot to manage. There’s a lot to sort of do. So it’s certainly not impossible for a teenager to understand that and do that. People can write in with examples of like, oh, this is a teenager who did this thing. But even like Lena Dunham who was super young as she started, she wasn’t that young. Craig: No. Poetry is very flexible. You can define it essentially how you’d like. In that regard it’s a little bit like lyrics. John: Yeah. Craig: And my daughter is an up and coming budding songwriter. And she writes really interesting stuff that is getting legitimate attention out there. And she’s lyrically very advanced. But it is a different deal. Because there’s a freedom to it. And that’s the misery of screenwriting and it sort of ties into our main topic is that there isn’t so much freedom to it. You are required to make things function in an interesting way in a fairly rigid format. And I don’t mean on the page format. I mean just the structure and the reality of what it means to write a two-hour-movie, or a one-hour-episode of television. Or a 30-minute-episode of television. So, my final answer is very rare skill, requires high functioning across all aspects of the brain, including visual imagination, language skills, empathy, IQ, EQ, all of it humming, all at once. As opposed to one area that is like through the roof but could Einstein tell a joke? Eh, I don’t know. John: Einstein’s episode of Friends, his spec Friends, was really disappointing. Craig: Atrocious. John: Just atrocious. Now, I’m sure we have teen listeners. So if you’re a teen listener who has other insights for us please do write in, because we’re curious what you think. Craig: I know what they’re going to be like. “Shut up old guys.” John: Megana, thank you for these questions. Craig: Thank you, Megana. Megana: Thanks guys. John: All right. It is time for our One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things. Two TV shows to recommend. The first is Hacks on HBO or HBO Max. I don’t even know what the difference is between HBO and HBO Max at this point. Craig: Oh, I can tell you. John: Tell me what the difference is. Craig: I’m so glad you asked. HBO Max is the service that delivers both HBO and other programming. Now, does that sound confusing? It does sound confusing. I’ve been described like HBO, the branded HBO stuff, is on a tab. So, you know, for– John: So Chernobyl is on that tab and The Last of Us will be on that tab. Craig: Chernobyl is on that tab. The Last of Us is on that tab. HBO Max covers a whole other world of programming that is a little bit, like for instance I guess a lot of the – like the DC shows probably are on HBO Max. It’s a very strange thing. John: It’s very strange. Craig: It’s so weird. John: Having watched the pilot episode for Hacks I cannot tell you whether there was the static-y HBO thing before it started, so I can’t tell you if it’s technically an HBO show or it’s just a show that I watched on HBO Max. Regardless, everyone would watch it because it’s really, really well done. This is the show that stars Jean Smart as a Las Vegas comedian who is kind of forced into hiring on a young joke writer and it’s their relationship. And it’s so well done. It was written by Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs, and Jen Statsky. Here’s the reason why I think it’s an HBO show. It looks so expensive. It looks like Succession in terms of like, wow, they spent some real money on that. And I just love that. I mean, I respect people who do a lot with a little, but I also respect when people do just a lot with a lot. And it looks just great. And everything about it is just flawlessly done, so please – I’ve only seen the pilot, but it’s just really good and I can’t wait to watch more episodes of Hacks. Another show I watched the whole season of this last week was Girls 5eva, which is on Peacock. Do you know the premise of Girls 5eva? Craig: No, this is the greatest. Is it like a girl band kind of thing? John: Exactly. And so it is a 2000s girl band that had sort of one big hit and then broke up, or sort of they never had a second hit. And so it’s following them up 20 years later as they are trying to form the group back again. It stars Sara Bareilles, Renee Elise Goldsberry from Hamilton. Craig: Oh my god. John: Busy Philipps. Paula Pell. The fifth member of Girls 5eva died in a tragic infinity pool accident. And it’s written by Meredith Scardino. Created by her. But it’s under the Tina Fey sort of umbrella. And so it has the 30 Rock-y/Kimmy Schmidt kind of feel and music. Real joke density. Just delightful. So if you enjoy 30 Rock or those kind of shows you really will love Girls 5eva. Great songs throughout. Craig: Well yeah. I mean, Sara Bareilles and Renee Elise Goldsberry, those two alone – I mean, I just watch them sing. So if they’re singing at all I would be thrilled. John: Oh they’re singing a ton. And Sara Bareilles is a really good actor. Craig: Isn’t that fun when that happens? John: It’s so good when someone is from a different field but they can actually – she can act her little heart out. Craig: A little bit like, you know, I think in a couple of weeks there might be an episode of Mythic Quest with another brilliant performance. John: I’m excited to see it. Craig: I’m going to just tease it like this. Craig with hair. John: Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Craig: It is so weird. I sent Melissa a picture from the makeup trailer. And I was wearing my mask and so she couldn’t see my whole face, but I just sent a picture of me wearing a mask, but with hair, and she wrote back, “Who is that?” She literally didn’t know it was me. John: Did not recognize her own husband. Craig: Yes. Correct. John: Love it. Craig: And happily she wasn’t like, “Hmm, who is that?” She was like, “Eww. Who is that?” John: Elon Musk treatment there, yeah. Craig: Exactly. John: The hair back. Craig: Well, my One Cool Thing this week is sort of a redo of another one. At one point, I’ve been looking for translation apps because I’m working with a number of folks from other countries. And there’s got to be a really good one. And I was using one I think called Mate, and it was decent. It didn’t quite do a perfect job translating. And it would lose formatting. For instance line breaks and stuff, which was really frustrating. And I’m so sorry, someone on Twitter, and I cannot find the tweet so I cannot give them credit, but I apologize. If you tweet back again I will give you credit next week. Turned me onto something called Deepl Translator. That’s Deepl Translator. And like a number of these things there’s a cost if you want to use it fully. It works really well. And I ran a translation by Kantemir Balagov, our Russian director. Because I always feel like translating to Russian that’s a good challenge. And he was like this is really good. So I’m using Deepl Translator. So if you do have needs for translating. And what I also love about the simplicity of it is, this is very good, you write a bunch of stuff, you want to translate it. You just highlight it and then you do, if you’re on a Mac, Command C twice. That’s all you do. You just do the copy command twice and it automatically brings up a screen and starts translating it. Very good. John: Nice. Craig: Yeah. John: Cool. That’s the future. Craig: The future is now. John: One last request for our Scriptnotes listeners. We have a Wikipedia page like all things on the Internet. There’s a Wikipedia page for Scriptnotes. It’s really out of date. It’s like super, super out of date. And so if people want to take a look at that and bring it a little bit more up to date. I’m going to put links in the show notes to the Scriptnotes index that Megana worked on and also a Scriptnotes guest list that we have. Because I want our Wikipedia page to be just a little bit more up to date. And you’re not really supposed to do it yourself. And so if you guys want to take that on as a little project that would be great to see our Wikipedia page be a little bit more updated if that’s a thing you like to do. I suspect we have some Wiki editors in our listenership right now. Craig: Oh, yeah. I haven’t looked at it in a long time. Now that you’ve said that it’s just going to be like– John: It’s going to be madness. Craig: Massive vandalism on our Wikipedia page. John: Wikipedia does a pretty good job dealing with vandalism. So I think we have responsible listeners who will do well by us. Craig: We have the best listeners. John: Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, the best producer. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Brian Ramos. If you have an outro you can send us a link to [email protected]. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter I am @johnaugust. Craig is there but he just kind of sends gifs, so don’t really ask him any questions. We have t-shirts. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts. And you can sign up for weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all of the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on the AP exams. Craig and Megana, thank you guys so much. Craig: Thank you. Megana: Thank you. [Bonus segment] John: All right, so Craig this last week my daughter took the AP US History exam. And so she had the whiteboard filled with a timeline of all these things. And I recognized some of the names of these events that occurred in US history but I couldn’t tell you what actually happened in them. I took AP US History and dropped it at the semester mark because I just did not like it. And I ended up finishing it on a tele-course over the summer and enjoyed that much more. I suspect, and you actually promised, that you have strong opinions about the AP exams. Craig: I do. John: Go. Craig: They should be eliminated. John: All right. Craig: They should be eliminated with force. They should be all piled together, put on some sort of space vessel, and shot into the sun. And here is why. AP exams are entirely unnecessary. The initial thought about AP exams was that if you were particularly advanced in a certain topic that you could test out of having to take an introductory class at the college level, which I understand. You’re paying for college. You don’t want to necessarily just sit there in a boring class that is a prerequisite to get to the class you want when it’s already something you already know. That’s all it was meant to be. Just place out of stuff so you could start a little further along in college. And what it has become in an insane arms race regarding your GPA, your grade point average. Because AP classes, which are classes that are taught to exams, and the AP classes should not exist in my belief, load on bonus points to your grade point average. And this insanity in our nation that every ounce of your existence as a child must be focused to the great prime achievement of getting into “good college” which therefore defines you as a good person and a future success. All of that is nonsense. It is destroying kids’ childhoods. It’s also destroying the entire concept of what high school education is supposed to be. It’s not supposed to be that. The stress that we are piling on these kids over this AP stuff is insane. Not only do they have to study massive amounts to take these exams and do way more work than they normally would have to basically do extra high school while they’re in high school, they’re also doing 12 other extracurriculars because they’ve got to be well rounded. You’ve got to be well rounded all so that you a group of people sitting in a room somewhere at freaking Dartmouth can go, “Yes, this person is worthy.” Horseshit. It’s horseshit. Look, if I could wave a magic wand I would eliminate most colleges entirely. OK? Because I think the entire higher education business is largely fraud and a certification Ponzi scheme. But if I can’t do that, and I can’t, then at least give me a want to get rid of the freaking AP exams. Or, if I can’t do that, keep the AP exams, get rid of AP classes, and say to kids if you really do want to advance yourself when you get to college just study on the side at home or over the summer and take this test and then you can. But we’re not giving you anything for your stupid GPA. So stop asking. And just go back to, oh my god, the highest number you can have for a GPA is 4.0. There you go. We’re done. No more of the valedictorian has a 6.8. John: Now, Craig, does it make you feel any better that colleges and many schools are actually already taking your advice and they are getting rid of AP exams? Craig: It does make me feel better. But it has to happen – OK, so education is largely driven by the major state schools. A little bit by Ivy League schools. But for instance almost everything that happens in the California public school system has to do with the UC system. If the UC system accepts something everybody is funneling towards that. Everybody. And it’s the UC system that has to say we’re not doing this anymore. It’s over. Stop it. John: Yeah. So no more Stand and Deliver for Craig Mazin. He believes that is a false promise, a false goal. That Edward James Olmos should be ashamed of himself. Craig: I don’t know about that because I don’t remember – what was he doing in that? Was he teaching an AP class? John: He taught his high school, he started the first AP Calculus class at his school. Craig: I mean, look, I have a whole problem with the entire genre. Like John Gatins, our screenwriting friend, has a genre. John: Inspiring teacher. Craig: Yeah. I didn’t know that insert, you know, minority could do that. I didn’t know that Latinos could do Calculus. That’s not a genre of movie, but it sort of somehow became one. Like, wow, I didn’t – yes, of course they can. Of course they can. And you should be able to teach anyone calculus. And if kids want to learn regular calculus just teach them calculus. Calculus is enough. Why is there AP Calculus? “Well, it’s extra calculus because I don’t want to have to do regular calculus at college.” Fine, then go do that on your own time. But this – what we’re doing is we’re putting college into high school. Then what the hell is college for? John: Now, Craig, back when you were in high school did you take AP classes? Craig: When I was in high school I was in a magnet program for medical sciences. So it was like a pre-pre-med program. We didn’t have AP classes. I don’t think we even had them at Freehold High School in New Jersey. What we did have were some specialized classes in topics that were not offered normally, like for instance we had a class in organic chemistry. It was called AP Orgo or anything like that. It was just organic chemistry. So we did not have AP classes as far as I understood them. I never took an AP exam. What I did was take a few of the SAT achievement tests. Do you remember those? John: Yeah. They’ve gotten rid of those largely, too. Craig: Exactly. All of it nonsense. All of it unnecessary. And I can’t explain how much I’m retroactively angry at the process of being a high school kid with this college insanity looming over me. I’m angry at how happy I was to get into the school I got. I’m angry that they made me happy about it. And I’m not coming from a point of bitterness. Meaning it wasn’t like I got rejected so I’m angry. I didn’t. I got accepted. And it’s wrong. It’s wrong. The whole thing is wrong. There are wonderful schools out there who teach kids terrific things as young adults in higher education and we don’t know their names because they don’t have marketing budgets or a $500 billion endowment. And so nobody cares about them. They’re just driven to whatever the hell, I don’t know, USC wants. But why? Why? Why? Why? John: This is not a defense of AP exams. Craig: Oh good. John: But I will talk about my high school experience was I ended up dropping AP US History. I did take AP English. And I learned a lot in AP English, but I think it was just the Honors English class. We read good stuff. We discussed it. Great. And so whether I took the test or not it doesn’t really matter. Craig: Yes. John: I also took AP Spanish Lit, which I think they still offer the test. It was a helpful test for me in that we read a lot of books and I took the test and I did well on it. And it was handy for me to get to college and I already had more than a semester done. And so it really lightened my load. In college let me sort of explore a lot more in college because I didn’t have to – I had so many literature credits going into it that I didn’t have to take certain classes which was great. So I appreciated that. But I recognize that on this conversation you and I are both like stumbling blindly because we have someone else on the call who has much, much more experience with AP exams. Megana Rao, can you talk to us about your AP experience? Megana: So, I just looked it up and I think I took like 12 or 13 AP classes. Craig: Oh god. No. John: And how do you feel about those AP classes and exams now looking back? Megana: I mean, I agree with so many of Craig’s points, and like College Board and the whole thing is just a racket. But, I really enjoyed taking those classes. And I think at a lot of public schools it gives – just because it is so standardized it gives you a really rigorous curriculum that you might not be getting from your education in certain school districts. And I think like at Harvard they didn’t accept them, but if I were to have gone to Ohio State like I would have started off as I think a spring semester sophomore. Craig: That’s crazy. Megana: I mean, this is a larger conversation about, you know, higher education. But I think that does seem like a good option for people because college is so outrageously expensive. So I think that option of being able to, I don’t know, mitigate that at some level feels like maybe a positive thing. Craig: But look what they’ve done? They’ve created a system where you have to jump through a thousand hoops as a child to then not have to pay them so freaking much because they charge so much. That is so warped. And by the way, don’t get me wrong, I’m not against honors classes. I’m not against kids if they are at a certain level and they want to learn a little bit more they can. Honors classes are fine. But this thing where there’s any indication whatsoever that taking an honors class is going to move you ahead in college and leap frog you past other things in college is crazy. And the idea that you would get these weighted GPAs, so suddenly grade point averages are in these insane inflated numbers is crazy. And the fact that education, higher education, costs so much that you’re going to beat yourself up as a 16-year-old to try and get a bunch of free things, but you don’t have to pay as much. How about don’t pay them anything? How about that? How about we shouldn’t even have to go to college? How about that? John: All right. So let’s imagine AP classes go away and look at the pros and cons of that. So obviously from a college level once they’ve admitted you as a student they could just give you a placement test to see like, OK, which physics should you be in, which Spanish should you be in. That’s great and fine. They can absolutely do that. So we’re really not losing much there. I want to get to Megana’s point which I had not considered but I think is really good is that if you’re looking across the country and different communities, where you have really good high schools or not really good high schools, the AP curriculum actually does give some comfort of like I know that if this student is taking this AP curriculum they’re going to actually at least have this. That they’re actually going to learn this and there’s going to be some kind of rigor, some sort of standardization. It may be too standardized. It may be sort of you’re teaching towards that test, but at least you know these people got this out of it. And in a country where there’s such wild disparities of educational access and opportunity AP could help arguably to make sure that students have access to a certain kind of rigor that they might not otherwise get in their underfunded schools. Craig: Allow me to rebut. John: Please. Craig: If the school can teach an AP curriculum then it can teach an AP curriculum. Just doesn’t have to call it an AP curriculum. Meaning it’s capable of doing it, therefore it can and should do it. But let’s be honest about the way our system functions. If there is a deal where there’s a specific thing called an AP class that leads to an AP exam that lets you skip ahead then rich kids will always do better. Always. Because they can afford tutors. And because they don’t have to work. They don’t have jobs. I had a freaking job. John: I had a job, too. Craig: I couldn’t have been in those classes. Like I couldn’t do the things. But, you know, these rich kids – did we talk about, what is it, the Polaris List? Did we talk about that on the show? John: I don’t remember what that was. No. Craig: He’s a kid, he’s a young guy. And he’s put together this list that basically is like every high school in the country, private or public, how many kids did they send to either Princeton, Harvard, or MIT. I believe those are the three that they picked. And it is astonishing. Astonishing. The top ten schools, it’s just like, wow. So Harvard Westlake. Percentages. John: Or Marlborough. All of those. Craig: It’s a joke. It’s a freaking joke. My school that I went to, this is so good. Because any time there’s a thing like that, they’ll all say we believe in equal access to education and all the rest of it. Somebody pointed out that if say Harvard, or Princeton, why not. I’ll go after my own. Let’s say Harvard or Princeton really was committed to equal opportunity of higher education for everybody in the country what they would do if they were really interested in that is kill themselves. They would dissolve their institutions and take all that money and create a whole bunch of equal opportunity programs spread out across the country. We’re talking about billions. Billions. Do you know what the Harvard endowment is? John: It’s probably a billion dollars itself. Craig: Oh, I think it’s got to be more. Megana: It’s something like $30 billion or $26 billion or something. John: Oh my god. Craig: $30 billion. $30. Do you see what I’m saying? Like when you really look at it, I know I sound crazy. I know I sound a little like QAnon here. But if you really look at the situation with just a very sober eye there is very little in our country that is as insane and Kafkaesque as the way we are educating our children to a purpose. And the purpose is getting more education from some place and then when they’re done we go, ha-ha, have fun. With no job. Have fun. You did it. You achieved something. You rode all the way to the top of the rollercoaster and that’s it. You just get to the top and then you fall off and you hit the ground. That’s it. John: Megana, I want to hear what you think about a life without AP classes. Megana: So I do agree with a lot of what Craig is saying. I recently read this tweet that was like Millennials have 4% of the national wealth and I think Gen X had had 9% and Baby Boomers have had like 21% when they were at this stage. And it’s because we have gone through the system and taken on all of this student debt and it has not paid off with the job market that’s been available to us. But, I will say that, you know, I did not come from one of those feeder schools and I was I think like the first kid maybe from my high school to go to an Ivy League, to go to Harvard. And when you get there and there are all of these kids from super elite prep schools and private schools from all over the world there is something reassuring in being like, OK, well we all took these classes and – like for some of the classes I just read those AP books on my own and then took the test and did well. And I’m not saying, I’m not advocating for AP, but there is something nice about having that standardization that I was able to have confidence that I was stepping up to freshmen year on sort of an equal playing field. And that those resources were easily accessible to me. Craig: I’m like you. I came from the same situation. John: Yeah. I want some clarification here. So, how many AP classes did you have versus tests did you have? Megana: I think I took 10 AP classes and then I took two that I did not have the classes for and I just took the test from reading textbooks. John: OK. So that’s something Craig would argue kind of in favor of to some degree, to be able to prove that on your own you did this thing. Craig: But the problem is that there are far fewer – the AP – let’s call it a ladder to success. That ladder is far narrower for people that come from backgrounds like yours or mine. And it’s why you were the first person to go to Harvard from your school. I don’t know if I was the first person to go to Princeton, but we didn’t send many people to Ivy League schools from my school and we still don’t. Maybe one or two. And there are dozens, dozens, of kids every year coming from Harvard Westlake. Why? It’s not because they are inherently smarter. It’s because everybody is getting a boost up that ladder. Everybody. This is what happens when you – you extend an opportunity and people game it because the entire thing is set up to be gamed and smart people are always going to figure out ways to mess with it. If the SAT is designed to be a standardized thing that gives everybody the same chance, well putting aside the inherent biases and however the test is created, it’s not an even playing field because now you have tutors. You have the Princeton Review. If you can pay for the Princeton Review you’re already doing better. If you go to two of those classes and you learn their simple methods of process of elimination and all of that stuff you are already doing better. It’s not – it all gets – by the way, Harvard’s endowment is $41 billion. Megana: Oh my goodness. Craig: Thank you. So, it’s like a small country. And these things that are dangled, if we eliminated all of it, if we just eliminated all of those things and we just said write your application and we’ll take a look, and we expanded the understanding of what a good school is, we’d be vastly better off. The problem for Harvard or Princeton, and if I worked at one of those admissions offices I don’t know what I would do, because I’m taking in 3% of the applications I receive. How the hell am I discriminating between all of these people? It’s impossible. John: It’s really hard. So I’ve been on Zooms with college admissions things that are organized to sort of talk through what they’re doing. And those admissions offices are on some of those Zooms. And they’ll say, listen, we’re not looking at ACTs or SATs. They’re just looking it up – in both UC schools – Cal State schools and UC schools are not taking SATs or ACTs. They’re not requiring them anymore. And so all of these admissions officers have to look for other things to sort of determine is this kid going to be able to succeed at our school. They look at grades. They look at where that kid falls in class rankings overall. What activities. And basically – and this sort of feels appropriate for a podcast about something – is what is this kid’s story? Basically how can this kid articulate sort of where they come from and what they’re trying to do? And that’s ultimately what they’re making admissions decisions based on. It’s tough. Craig: I wish they wouldn’t. Because that’s gross. When we take a step back and we think about it, some panel of eight people in a room are examining what my child’s story is? F-off. They don’t know my kid and they’re never going to know my kid from an application. It’s impossible. The whole concept of it is insane. That’s my point. The whole concept of deciding who belongs here is insane. And the notion of selectivity is kind of insane. I just don’t get it. I don’t. And I will remain forever angry about it. Oh, and also US News & World Report should go to hell. John: All right. But, the good news is I think we actually have a first candidate for Change Craig’s Mind is like if we can change Craig’s mind on some aspect of the college process then that will be a goal for this. I don’t even know what I want to change him to. Craig: Or anything. Just change it. John: Yeah. Craig: Oh man, I feel bad for that person. Oh, this was a good one. I feel so good. I feel like I exorcised a lot of demons today. John: Yeah. Craig: God, I hope some admissions officer writes in like, “Well, you know, we actually can tell about what a human being is like from their five pages and their dumb essay.” Oh please. Please. Beat it. [laughs] That’s all I have to say. Thank you for tolerating me through all of that, by the way. You’re both incredibly patient and lovely people. John: Thank you both. Craig: Thanks guys. Megana: Thank you. Bye. John: Bye. Craig: Bye. Links: The Scriptnotes Index Scriptnotes Guest List Help us update the Scriptnotes Wikipedia page Seth Rogan on Productivity The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion? by Oliver Burkeman Hacks with Jean Smart on HBO Max Girls 5eva on Peacock Horses are pretty because horses are pretty sketch on child-director prodigy Deepl Translator Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt! Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription! John August on Twitter Craig Mazin on Twitter John on Instagram Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!) Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Email us at [email protected] You can download the episode here.The post Scriptnotes, Episode 502: Free Will (Or, It’s Okay to Not Be a Screenwriter), Transcript first appeared on John August.

The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin. John: And this is Episode 384 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast we’re going to talk about plot holes and why sometimes you’re better off leaving them than trying to fix them. We’ll also be answering listener questions about things that screenwriters notice that normal people might not. And sequences and outlines and sort of where to fix those problems when they come up. Craig: Mm-hmm. So it’s pronounced plot holes and not plotholes. It looks like plotholes. John: So I was looking at the word plot holes and I realized today, and maybe I’m just dumb and never noticed it before, it’s based on pot holes, like pot holes the holes in the street. Craig: Is it? Is it? John: I bet it is. I bet that is the derivation of the word. Craig: You think, because to me even if there weren’t pot holes there is a hole in your plot. It makes sense. You might be right. I don’t know. Who can answer this question for us? John: I think John McWhorter can answer this question for us. Craig: Oh, god, I would love to have him on the show. You know I’m like obsessed him? John: You are. Because he’s also obsessed with musicals and you guys are pretty much separated at birth. Craig: Musicals and language and language usage. He’s the one that turned me on to the whole – what is it – I can’t remember the word he used to describe it, but it’s the thing where people will add an “ah” at the end of a word to indicate emphasis, like No-ah. John: Yes. Stop-ah. Craig: What are you doing-ah? John: Yep. Craig: Love that. John: It’s that extra little shwa, that little shwa. Craig: So weird. Anyway, he’s a genius. John: He’s a genius. We also have news. So our news is about three upcoming events. Craig: Wow, that’s almost too many. John: The Princess Bride, January 27 at 5pm. So, I think the rules are that the doors will open at 4:30 in which case WGA members can go in and get their seats. At 4:45 everyone is free to get their seats. The movie will start at 5pm at the WGA Theater. And then afterwards we will discuss it in a very classic let’s take a deep dive on this movie, except we’ve just watched this movie. So, that is the plan for January 27th. Craig: Awesome. I think that’s going to be – and it’s going to be fun. And it’s in celebration, of course, of the great William Goldman. I happen to love the movie. I think most people do love the movie. It’s one of those movies that a lot of people sort of memorize, but I love digging into these things and finding these little bits and bobs that are just so gorgeous that make it work the way it does. John: I agree. We have a live show coming up in Seattle. It’s long been rumored. It now actually has a date. It is February 6 at 7pm. It’s going to be at the Northwest Film Forum. There’s information in the show notes about how you get tickets, if there are tickets, or if you just show up. We’re recording this ahead of time so I don’t really know what those rules are, but Megan will have the information and those will be in the show notes. But we look forward to seeing Seattle on February 6 at 7pm. Craig: Yeah. That’s going to be fun. I love Seattle. John: Seattle is great. I love it, too. Finally, this second Arlo Finch book comes out in February and there’s a launch event February 9 here in Los Angeles at Chevalier’s Bookstore. It is at 12:30pm. And you should come see me and I will sign your books. It’s your first chance to buy the book in Los Angeles. And you can come. I will probably read a chapter from it. And I’ll offer answers to questions that might come up. So come, bring kids who might be able to read the book, but also just come and say hi because I’ll be there and I’ll happily sign your book. Craig: I mean, I kind of feel like when people see you in real life there’s a little bit of squealing now. John: There might be. A little bit. I might spark joy for certain people. Craig: For certain people. John: Certain people. Not all the people. Craig: No. Select people. John: Select people. I’m going to segue into sparking joy for just a second because I blogged this week. I don’t blog very often. And I’m going to spoil who actually said this. There was a project that I was considering doing, it was a pretty big project that would be more than a year of my life to do. And I had a phone call about it and I was thinking about it and Megan, our producer, asked me, “But does it spark joy?” She’s using the Marie Kondo phrase. And I ended up blogging about this. And I thought it was actually exactly the right question. Because when I admitted to myself that while I admired the project and I was intrigued by it, it didn’t actually bring me joy. And if I were to lose the project I wouldn’t really feel that sad. It was a good signal to me that I probably shouldn’t pursue the project. And so my new thing when I’m considering a project is asking myself if it sparks joy. Craig: It’s a great idea. And I’ve been going through this a lot myself. The danger is that sometimes if you’ve been working for a while without concern for joy sparks, you know, you’ve been working because it pays well, or because you felt it would kind of move things forward to a place where you could work on things that are just joy-sparkers, then you almost are unfamiliar with how to measure your own potential joy in something. The other issue that I have always, and have always had, is my joy, my spark of joy, will always be followed by a spark of panic. So, I love something, I’m so excited about something, and I can’t wait. And then about two days later I’m suddenly suffused with dread. That this thing that inspired joy in me is now this dead thing. Just lying in the street like a big, I don’t know, dead side of beef and I want nothing to do with it. This goes on all the time – this may just be me. John: No, it’s not that way. There’s instantly a kind of regret, like once you’ve gotten the thing, it’s the dog who is chasing the car and finally catches the car. It’s like, oh no, oh no, is this really what I want? Craig: Yeah. John: And it was recognizing that if I had caught this project I might not really want the project. And I remember a conversation with you, this was off-mic so it was maybe before we were recording an episode, there was a very, very big property that was coming into your universe. Craig: Yes. John: And you asked my advice – you don’t often ask my advice – but I said the equivalent sort of thing is like but do you really want to be writing blank project? And is that a dream of yours? And you’re like, oh no. Then that’s your answer. Craig: [laughs] Yeah. You know, it’s funny. I asked a few people advice on that one because I was really unsure of my own instinct I think. Because it seemed a little crazy to say no. And I asked Rian Johnson as well and I got, I think, halfway through the title and he just went, “No.” And by the way that’s the kind of advice I like. So it’s just like, oh good, you’re not actually even giving me advice. You’re just providing me the comfort of your certainty. I like – thank you. That’s really nice. But that’s a great example of something where it seemed to me that I would not experience joy. And, in the end, you’re not simply protecting yourself. You’re actually also protecting everyone else. Because in the end they are relying on you to carry them through this incredibly important phase, writing, with your passion. And if you run out of it they can smell it pretty quickly I suspect. John: Yeah. So I want to circle back to one thing you said is that at certain points in your career that question of like does it spark joy is not going to be the most important question. The most important question at certain points in your career is will they pay me money, is this a paid job I can take and actually deliver. And so I don’t want to sort of skip over that because that is such an important part of your early career is chasing all those projects and landing those projects even if they’re not the ones you really love. And you have to fake that you have that spark of joy on a lot of projects to land those projects. That is totally valid and true. Craig: Right. John: What I think we’re both recognizing though is sometimes you can get so caught up in chasing things you start realizing like, oh wait, I shouldn’t be chasing these things anymore. I should actually probably doing the things that are meaningful to me. Craig: Exactly. You know, John Gatins has such a great term for this, because he recognizes that there are times when you write things that you are in love with and then he says there are those other jobs that are Geisha work. And I love that. It’s Geisha work. Meaning it’s not just tawdry. It’s not this kind of empty thing. There’s an art to it. There is a care. There is a craft. There is a loving attention. But it’s not love. It’s Geisha work. John: Yeah. It’s Geisha work. Let’s get to some follow up. So Joel wrote in to say he was hoping we could do some follow up on something we mentioned in a recent show. “In Episode 383, John while discussing the film Mortal Engines, said something like, ‘They set themselves some interesting story challenges.’ I found that an intriguing idea because I often wonder how much of the work that people do can only be appreciated by fellow crafts people. Can you name some other films or TV shows that fall into the category of interesting challenges that might go unnoticed by the general public?” And I thought it was a good question because there definitely are things which we talk about in terms of like, oh wow, that was a really hard thing to try to do, and you might not notice that if you’re just watching the film. Some things which occurred to me that I saw, things with very limited dialogue because as a screenwriter if there’s not much dialogue it can be very hard to externalize ideas. And so A Quiet Place has very little dialogue in it. The Hush episode of Buffy has very little dialogue. Likewise, shows that have too many characters or movies that have too many characters. So the first Charlie’s Angels is a huge writing challenge and I don’t think people noticed that enough that you have three characters who each have their own storylines that have to fit into the bigger storyline. They still have their villains. There have to be twists and reveals. So to keep all those balls in the air is a real challenge that you wouldn’t have if you had a single protagonist. You worked on the next Charlie’s Angels movie, so you encountered the same thing. Craig: Yeah. It’s definitely an interesting thing to keep those balls in the air because you feel, well, I think if you’re doing it responsibly you feel an anxiety when a particular character hasn’t spoken in a while. And I think we talked about this in the last podcast. And you also feel an anxiety if the characters have these little arcs that are either too small or too out of whack with the other characters or not interlacing with the other characters. So there is a lot of craft that goes into that stuff. That said, I would rather write a movie with a group of three or four “normal” people than another spoof movie where one of the biggest challenges in writing spoof is your characters have no internal life whatsoever. And there’s never a moment where anyone just stops and thinks. Ever. It is excruciating. It’s like taking away – we say to people you’re going to run, just remember to breathe. And with spoof it’s like you’re going to run, also you can’t breathe. Not allowed. It’s really annoying. John: No breathing is possible. Another movie with a lot of characters which I think screenwriters really acknowledged was a real challenge was The Big Short, because The Big Short you have a ton of characters who have to give really important information. They need to feel like real people because in some of the cases they are based on real people. And yet you don’t have time to sort of give meaningful inner lives and challenges that are going to be resolved in a normal way. So it’s making sure that those people feel like they have weight even though they’re not going to do normal movie character things over the course of the two hours. Craig: Yeah. And in those movies, too, you have a certain challenge of instruction. If a movie does this well, or if a show does it well, you don’t notice. That’s kind of the hallmark of these challenges is that when it’s really nailed you don’t even realize that they’ve done something incredibly hard to do. I don’t think when people first saw, I don’t know what the first Disney animated movie was that had that multi-plane technology to it, but I suspect that they didn’t realize just how difficult it was to get that small bit of depth, that little bit of parallax motion. It was enormously difficult. And that’s a sign that they did it well. John: And so I think narratively sometimes we don’t recognize that like, oh, there’s a lot of work happening to make it feel like – so you don’t notice that this thing is happening in front of you. Craig: Which is good, because I mean in the end that’s a big part of our job is making it look like nobody did a job. You know? But it can be tough. Certainly when I see a movie like The Big Short I really admire the way that they went about instructing us, but instructing us in such a manner that they knew confidently we would understand. John: Yep. Craig: And that was pretty great. John: I could have put this under limited dialogue, but shows and movies with limited characters can be really challenging. So, Castaway. So often you have to externalize Tom Hanks’s thoughts, and so you create Wilson, you create other ways to sort of get us into his head even though he has no other character to talk with. So, if it had been a book then we could be just directly in his head. Because movies don’t let us do that, they have to find ways to externalize those thoughts. Same with Gravity. So much of Gravity is just Sandra Bullock. So how do we know what she’s trying to do, what she’s feeling, what the next thing is for her? That’s a real storytelling challenge. In addition to all of the technical challenges of making that movie, the storytelling challenges are great in a movie like Gravity. Craig: Yeah. John: And then Alfonso Cuarón’s latest, Roma, is a similar kind of thing in a weird way because even though there’s plenty of characters and there’s plenty of dialogue, your central character is not a classic protagonist and it’s kind of from her point of view, but it’s also kind of from an omniscient point of view. It’s a really – he created really fascinating challenges for himself in how he was letting us into this world. It’s almost the place is more the protagonist and we’re following a character but not necessarily seeing the world through her eyes. And I thought it was brilliantly done, but a really difficult choice. Craig: You know, it occurs to me that a lot of the challenges that you’re describing in live action are things that animation has a very easy time with. For instance, expressing internal thoughts. Spider Man: Into the Spider-Verse was able to kind of create a little bit of a new animated language so that you could see and hear people’s thoughts as they desired. But then of course in animation the problem is just making someone take one step is incredibly painstaking. John: Lastly, I think the thing to talk about is movies that involve animals or children. So there are huge production challenges with animals and children, the number of hours they can work, or sort of the trainers that do that. But when you think about those as a writing challenge it’s how do we get in the head of this dog that is in front of us or this young character who may not be able to speak, so so much is going to rely on us looking in their face or their eyes and what we’re setting up about the world around them, how people are interacting with them. The order of events is going to be dictating our understanding of who these characters are. And those are narrative challenges that you probably don’t recognize until you actually have to do it and you see what the work is on the page to get you there. Craig: I mean, just a simple thing like a drama in which a child witnesses a terrible event. Well, can they be there on that day? Will they actually see the terrible event? If not, how will they know what to say or do if they don’t know what the terrible event is? Do you describe it to them? Are you the first person to describe to a six-year-old what sexual assault is? These are real issues that people tangle with all the time when they’re making movies or television when you’re dealing with children because children are being asked to portray other children who have gone through some sort of trauma, sometimes. Not all the time. John: A classic example is Kubrick on The Shining. And so he knew he was going to have these horrifying images. He also knew he was going to have this young kid. And so he would have conversations with the young kid about like, so, you’re seeing this thing. He wasn’t describing what the actual cutaway shot was going to be, but the thing that would get the kind of reaction that would be appropriate to intercut with. And that’s a thing you do all the time. You do as-if kind of substitutions for those things. You can’t do that with a dog or a cat. And so you have to figure out what you’re going to do to get you into that place. One of the biggest writing challenges I had was a movie that was never made called Fenwick’s Suit. And the central character in Fenwick’s Suit is this suit that comes to life. And so I had to think about like, well, how are we going to know what the suit is thinking? It has no face. It has lapels which can sort of function like ears. We can see its general body language. But it was a real challenge. And it would have been a challenge for the director and special effects people, but like to show that on the page was really tough because he couldn’t talk to anybody. And so I had to be able to find sentences that would describe exactly what the action was he was trying to do and how people would understand that. Craig: Well, you know, that’s something that we might be able to help you with post-facto when we start talking about breaking rules. Because I’ve been thinking about that very topic a lot lately. John: Cool. All right. Let’s get to Jim’s question. Do you want to take that? Craig: Jim writes, “I’m 82 nonlinear pages into a script that features seven notable characters. Altogether they’re split across either three or four threads within the story. I’m trying to tie everything up while giving the characters their appropriate exposure and screen time. Would you, John August, have any advice from a technical standpoint on the best way to map out stories like these? Do we know how they tackle the stuff on Thrones?” He means Game of Thrones, by the way. John: Game of Thrones. Talking the lingo. Craig: Jim, go ahead and say Game of Thrones next time. John: Just a few extra syllables. So, I would say the script that Jim is describing is probably an ensemble piece, there’s multiple characters doing multiple things. They may be in different timelines. It may be more like Go. It may be a more straightforward thing. But he’s describing a situation where different characters have different goals and different agendas and we’re not following a single character through the whole thing. I think this is a situation where you’re using cards or a whiteboard or some other form of visually displaying who all the characters are and what they’re trying to do and figuring out where they intersect. Because if you could pull back and take a look at it you might see like, oh wow, this character doesn’t have enough to do. It’s not feeling rewarding. And you might be able to find some good balance between the characters. The toughest thing you’re going to probably find in getting all these storylines to fit together nicely is that every time you’re cutting from one character’s storyline to another character’s storyline that it really feels like progress and that you’re not just like putting a pin in that and going off to someplace else. Craig: Yeah. John: I’m sure I don’t know the Game of Thrones writing process, but I’m sure quite early on in the breaking of stories they’re really thinking about like, OK, what is it going to be like to have these two scenes back to back and how is one scene going to inform the next scene? Might they switch some things around in post? I’m sure they do. But in breaking the script they’re always thinking about like what is it going to feel like to go from this character’s storyline to this character’s storyline and what are we gaining by making that cut right there? Craig: They’re also making episodic television and it sounds like Jim is maybe making a feature because he’s 82 pages into a script, singular. So Game of Thrones can just simply stop following a character for two episodes. They can just stop and then they can come back to them later and sort of catch up. In a movie, not really. You can’t just stop. I mean, you can take a break. It’s a small break. But then you’ve got to come back. So, one thing to ask yourself, Jim, is does your script actually feature seven notable characters or does it feature four notable characters and three sort of notable characters? Can you compress? Obviously if you can’t compress then you have to kind of stack your characters in terms of importance and complexity. Maybe character six and seven are just sort of thin, maybe a little bit more types as opposed to full people that require a lot of attention. But the best way to map out stories like these, I believe, is to map them out the good old fashioned way from the point of view of your protagonist, or if you have a dual protagonist, two people, what they want, what they need, what’s wrong with them, what do they have to become. How does your plot help them or hurt them? And then these other people involved need to be looked at as allies and enemies and obstacles and assistants. John: Absolutely true. And if you are doing something that is sort of more chapter-based, like Go is chapter-based, do that for each section and really think about like, OK, who is the equivalent of the protagonist in that section and what is their arc going to be over the course of that section. But if it’s a movie there’s going to be an expectation of progress that gets you to a certain place. Unless you’re doing The Big Short, like we talked about before, and that’s a real challenge. And in that situation maybe you’re not worrying about sort of the balance of the characters and who has the most screen time, but are we telling the overall macro story well enough and am I using the characters that I’ve picked to tell that story as well as I can. Craig: Exactly. John, do you want to see what Cade from Boise, Idaho wants to say? John: Cade from Boise, Idaho writes, “Today I came across Episode Three—“ Craig: Whoa. John: Episode Three. Way back in the vault. Craig: Whoa. John: “In which you discussed the process of outlining. I’m writing a spec TV show for which I recently finished the outline but there are oh so many problems with the story. I don’t know how deep I should go revising based on an outline. What are the things you look for to rework at the outline stage?” Craig? Craig: The outline stage is the story stage, so you don’t stop until you feel quite confident that the story makes sense. That it holds together. This is if you are kind of outline conscious and I am. Some people don’t really like to outline and their process is one more of discovery. But for me I’m a big outliner and this is the time where I get to acid test the story before I go through all the effort of writing the script. So, if there are so many problems with the story you’ve got to take a step back, ask yourself why, and then maybe start again. It’s just an outline, right? It’s just index cards. You haven’t built a house that you realize now is leaning slightly to the left and you have to demolish the whole thing. It’s just index cards. Don’t be afraid. Do it. Just start again. John: So here’s what’s confusing about the term spec. And so what Cade is referring to as a spec TV show probably means an episode of an existing TV show for which he’s writing an episode for which he’s not being paid. So basically if he was writing an episode of Game of Thrones, a spec episode of Game of Thrones means it’s an episode of Game of Thrones. Versus a spec script in general means a script that there’s no underlying material. It’s confusing and we should have picked different words, but that’s sort of what it means. So, I think particularly if Cade is writing a spec episode of Hawaii 5-0 that outline has to be tight and flawless and it needs to completely make sense because that’s a show that is entirely based on the plot of the episode. And so if the plot isn’t making sense on an outline level it’s not going to make sense in the finished script version. So, fix that now. The outline phase is great for tackling logic problems, for like this just doesn’t make sense. It needs to make sense that way. The outline is not going to get you to sort of the more subtle emotional problems. That may not really become clear at the outline level. So, don’t kill yourself to write the perfect emotional outline because that’s just not the finished thing. And sometimes you’ll find in the development process if you are writing outlines for people they keep pushing for all this emotional detail that just doesn’t make sense on an outline level. So be mindful that you’re not trying to fix problems that just can’t be fixed in that medium. Craig: Yeah. You certainly can’t achieve the emotional complexity of the screenplay. There’s no question about that. What you can do with an outline I think is build and investigate the function of the emotional pieces, like the big gears. If this person feels this way and then this happens and then they end up with that person does this make sense that they would feel the following? Would we feel something there? Has the story and the interactions between these two led to a moment that would create a feeling? That’s something that you could probably figure out from an outline and during outline. It’s certainly something I work on in outlines. But the deeper stuff, yes, at some point you can just simply remind people, well yeah, you know, this is an outline. And for yourself as well, if there’s a little thing that’s kind of bugging you about it, sometimes you just let that go because in the writing you find a solve. John: Let’s get into our feature topic which is plot holes and I think that ties in very well to this issue of outlines versus the finished product. So let’s talk about what plot holes even are because I think there’s a wide range of things we could describe as plot holes. But for today’s conversation, I’m going to go to the Wikipedia definition, which is of course the definitive definition of anything should be a community-generated webpage somewhere. Craig: Of course. John: They define, “In fiction, a plot hole is a gap or inconsistency in a storyline that goes against the flow of logic established by the story’s plot. Such inconsistencies include such things as illogical or impossible events, statements or events that contradict other events in the storyline. The term is more loosely also applied to ‘loose ends’ in a plot. Sidelined story elements that remain unresolved by the end of the plot.” Another definition of it which I found, there’s a site called MoviePlotHoles.com, and their tag line is where suspension of belief comes to die. Craig: Well at least they know who they are. John: Yes. And so basically what we’re looking for when we’re talking about this conversation of plot holes are things in the finished product that just feel like, OK, there’s a mistake there and this mistake could bug people. And we’re going to get into whether it’s worth trying to correct this. But in a perfect world, I guess, these things would not exist and sort of where they come from, let’s talk about sort of the general shapes of them and sort of what you do as you encounter plot holes. Craig: Yeah. And these are the things that drive us crazy as writers, of course. They are, fair warning to all of you out there who want to be professional, they are also things that studio executives and producers and actors and anyone on set are very capable of seeing immediately. There are things that no one else sees that we do. A lot of times people say, “Why don’t we just move that over there?” And everyone goes, “Yeah, why don’t we?” And then there’s one person in the world, the writer, going, “Oh god, you don’t understand what you just did.” But everyone – everyone – can see plot holes and they will come at you with them. They will come at you. There will be a third assistant in the costume department will walk up to you and say, “By the way, I have a question for you. Does this make sense blah-blah-blah?” And you go, OK, it does. Here’s why. But you think – see, everyone feels entitled to discuss what they perceive as a potential plot hole. John: Yeah. And so sometimes these are things which wouldn’t have been reflected in the script anyway, but they do have a bearing on story. So for example like that character was carrying their gun in this scene so why don’t they have their gun now? And so these are things where it’s the props department is going to be – as they’re reading through the script is going to be asking that question at every point so that they are not creating these plot problems. We’re going to focus on it from the script level, but know that every department is going to be thinking about this and trying to make sure that they’re consistently logical. So, it’s not just your responsibility, but you’re going to get blamed for it. So, let’s talk about what this is. Craig: [laughs] Yes. John: So, general categories of plot holes – I would define one is problems of information. Which is when characters have knowledge that was never passed to them. So somehow magically they know something that the audience knows but it’s never quite clear how they learned it. Craig: Right. John: Related is characters who don’t know something which we know they should know, or they seemed to know before, or they knew last week. There’s a show that I love very much but one of the characters is a doctor and yet she doesn’t seem to know some very basic things which is frustrating. Craig: Like where the heart is? John: Yeah. And so it’s like – or like they encounter something which is like but we already saw you do that, so this is not a new thing for you. This should not be a challenge for you at all. So, anyone in their position should know how to do that thing. So that’s a problem with information. Often you find problems of time and geography, so multiple days seem to pass or didn’t pass and it wasn’t quite clear – the timelines just don’t match up. There are eight day weeks. Something is grossly wrong here. The sun never sets or it sets twice. The plot relies on two things happening simultaneously but the characters couldn’t have anticipated those things were going to happen simultaneously. There’s like a coincidence that just doesn’t make sense. This is the thing that bugged me all the time on Alias which is a show I genuinely loved, but Sydney Bristow could somehow fly to Asia and back in the course of a day. She has supersonic teleportation powers. Craig: Yeah. No one is really good about that, are they? John: Yeah. And I think this is a Too Fast, Too Furious, my friend Nima will correct me if I’m citing the wrong Fast and Furious movie, but there’s an action sequence that’s taking place on a tarmac where a plane is taking off and it’s like a 17-minute action sequence and the plane is moving the entire time. And so that runway would have to be like 40 miles long. Craig: Right. John: So, just to like – is that a plot hole? We’ll get into that. It’s a thing you have to suspend your disbelief in order to get there and some people can’t suspend their disbelief. Craig: Yeah. I think that there’s a line between, you know what, we’re just going to break the rules of reality to achieve something, and a plot hole which is we messed up. We actually legitimately screwed up here. They shouldn’t be able to do that inside of the logic of our own. You know, in Fast and Furious the logic of that world, the physics of that world, you could have a really super long runway and time is elastic. But, you couldn’t have something in the Fast and Furious world where somebody simply didn’t know something that they knew 30 minutes earlier and we saw them know. You can’t have a character see someone and then later say honestly, “I’ve never seen them before.” That’s a plot hole. John: That would be a plot hole. Or like they can’t change a tire. You know what, that’s going to come with it. You’re going to be able to change a tire. And some of what you’re talking about is like, you know, your movies bend the world in certain ways. So Charlie’s Angels, like physics was sort of optional. They could do things that – it was heightened and so you had to sort of go with the heightened nature of it. Many years ago I wrote an article about Spider Man 3 called The Perils of Coincidence and I’ll put a link in the show notes to that because there are premise coincidences which are – you get one of those for free. Like almost every movie relies on some coincidence that’s why this story is taking place now. But there were so many coincidences in Spider Man 3 that I needed to sort of acknowledge that like stacked together they form a plot hole because no, no, no there’s just too much happening here. It’s just all too arbitrary that these things all happened in the same time. Craig: Yeah. If you put too many together it starts to take on the meme of a plot hole because what I think we presume even if we don’t presume it deliberately is that plot holes happen because the writers got stuck and needed to do a thing and didn’t know how to do it without breaking something. And that is also why I think coincidences stack up. We presume it’s because the writers needed something to happen and they didn’t know how to do it without breaking something. John: Yeah. And in general, we’ll get into fixes later on, but anything you can do that your hero is actually creating the situation gets you out of that coincidence problem. Craig: Right. John: If something happens because of your hero, then it’s just not random. Or if it something happens because the villain, then it’s not random. So just finding ways to match character motivation to events gets you through most of those situations. Or, if it’s still a little unlikely, you buy it more because you saw a character do it. Craig: Yeah. And generally that works in your favor because it feels like it’s tightening things up. It is creating a sense of harmony and the audience gives you credit for it. One of my favorite kinds of plot holes is the kind that negates the need for the entire story to have happened at all. I love these. And I’m just calling it problems of over-complication, because I don’t know what else to call it. But the idea is that your plot needs to exist so that your movie exists, but it doesn’t need to exist for the actual events of the movie or the goals of the movie or the character. And one of the classic examples is a movie that you and I love that we have talked about many times on the show and that’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. And it goes a little something like this. Once Indiana Jones discovers that the Nazis are looking in the wrong place because they don’t have both sides of the medallion, all you have to do at that point is nothing. Just do nothing. They will never find it. Now, you can argue, of course, well he’s compelled to find it because he wants to see this thing. It’s part of who he is. And that makes sense. But the movie never really says that, so like in a perfect plot hole address somebody would say, “That’s it, we’re done. Let’s go home.” And he says, “No, I can’t. I just can’t.” And then you would say, OK, at least the movie understands that that’s a thing, right? But what they went for in Raiders was no one is ever going to comment on that, let’s just keep going, as if it makes sense that we’re still trying to stop the Nazis who have no idea and never will know where this thing is. And I love that. I just kind of love that. John: Yeah. And I would say this problem of over-complication often ties into villain plots and villain plans because there’s so many action movies particularly where – or thrillers – where if you step back it’s like, wait, was that really the easiest way to get a million dollars? That was really complicated. There are so many simpler ways to do that that wouldn’t have involved most of what we saw in the movie, but then you wouldn’t have a movie. And so you can try to sort of lay the track to make it clear why it needed to happen this way. But sometimes in trying to lay that track you are making the answer more important than the question in many ways. Like make it seem like, oh, this is really important. Like, no, no, I was just trying to explain it away. In trying to get rid of the problem you actually made the problem worse. Craig: This comes up I think all the time. When you are in development and the studio or the producer spot a plot hole, their instinct which I think is a normal human instinct is to pave it. Let’s fill the hole. But as writers we understand that that is a treacherous at to undertake because in filling that hole or fixing the hole, patching it over, you can create a problem that is actually worse than the existence of the hole in the first place. John: Yeah. So, before we fix all plot holes let’s bring up a couple more issues of why these plot holes happen, because it’s not enough to say like oh this was a plot hole, but like where did that come from? I think probably the biggest cause of plot holes in movies is like there was a scene or there was something that addressed that issue and so what you see in the final film doesn’t make sense but that’s because something got cut or changed in the process. So either scenes were reordered, which is why the timeline doesn’t make sense, or they just took something out and that is the reason why this happened. An example I found online was The Lost World: Jurassic Park when the T-Rex is on the ship, he’s in the cage but all the people on the ship are dead, so how did he kill everybody and then get back in the cage and lock the door? And the answer apparently is that there was supposed to be this velociraptor stuck on board and there was a whole scene and it just got cut. Craig: Yeah. John: That happens. And that’s a classic thing and you and I both have movies where like there really was an answer there, but the movie was running long, that wasn’t an important scene, it got snipped out. And so whether it’s timeline problems or some logic problems or like how that person got that piece of information, where was that phone call, we never saw that phone call, it’s because it wasn’t interesting and therefore it got dropped. Craig: And I would argue that maybe 80% of legitimate plot holes that you spot in movies are not the writer’s fault. They were addressed or dealt with and then either there was a legitimately good reason that a scene had to come out of the movie. It was infected with a bad performance, or it just seemed to not really be what the audience wanted at that moment in the movie. Whatever the reason is, it had to go. And so everyone watches a movie and presumes that every single piece of film that was shot is in the movie. It’s not even remotely the case. And I would say also there are times when the problem – in movies in particular – the problem is that the director made a mistake. Directors change things all the time in features because they are entitled to by our system. But occasionally, oh so very rarely, they do so in a capricious manner that actually does overturn an apple cart and cause a plot hole to occur. John: Yep. It can be a situation where, oh, I really wanted this scene to take place at night rather than daytime, because it’s going to look better in this location. And maybe that makes perfect sense and maybe it truly does look better, but if these people are supposed to be on two sides of a phone call and they’re in the same time zone, why is night in one place and daytime in the other place? That happens all the time. Craig: Happens all the time. Or, you know what, I want this guy to stand here when he sees him come in there because it looks awesome. And then later the writer watches and says, “Um, if he’s standing here and they’re standing there, neither one of them can see this third person that they’re both supposed to be noticing.” So there’s a plot hole now. We saw them not see that person and later they’re going to say how they saw that person in that place. Plot hole. Yeah. John: Plot hole. Another reason plot holes happen I think sometimes, especially in series, is when it’s a moving target and so Harry Potter is the classic example. They started filming the movies before the books were all finished, so there’s some things which show up in the books that don’t quite match up to things that are going to happen later on in the books. They sometimes have to explain around that. So even though JK Rowling was involved in both, she was ultimately more responsible for making logic happen within her books and she didn’t necessarily know that that one thing that was happening in movie two was going to be a very difficult thing to pay off later on. The rules of where you can apparate. And they would need to do some things – they would need to make some choices that weren’t going to be paying off later on. So, characters could show up in places that didn’t make sense or an adaptation might establish one relationship that is not actually the same relationship in the books. So the moving target of it all is a real problem. So you see that in both series but also in movie series. Craig: It is a shame that series and movie series and television series that do this well I think get extra penalized when they stumble. John: Yeah. True. Craig: I mean, JK Rowling created this remarkably consistent world over seven books. Very few what you would call plotty mistakes. You may not enjoy a certain aspect of her plotting, but it was well thought – it was really carefully well thought through and done. Similarly Game of Thrones, right? I mean, they have all these characters. They’re all interlocking/interlacing. And then, OK, so there’s one scene where a dragon shows up somewhere a little too quickly and people lose their mind. John: Yeah. Craig: Because they are relying in a sense, they become comfortable with the notion that they’re in good hands. That the show is going to take care of them. And so when you have a movie that’s a little more fast and loose with things no one really cares. They’re just like, meh, you know, it’s fine. It’s all good. John: Yeah. Finally, I would say that some cases the reality would be either not cinematic or would be really gruesome. A thing I found online was pointing out that like when Ant Man is tiny, when he punches people, the force with which he would punch people would be more like a bullet. It would rip flesh and bone. So it shouldn’t knock somebody down. It should rip through them. And they could choose to show that in Ant Man movies. But that would be gory and disgusting, so they don’t do that. Sometimes the expectations of the genre steer you towards certain solutions that aren’t entirely logical but are logical for the kind of movie you’re making. Craig: Yeah. I mean, the physics of all of it is absurd. They will play around and say, “Well, you know, we’ve got the physics of him doing this,” but you look at it and you go if you are going to jump from there to there, or if you’re going to push off and fly from there to there, you will create this massive crater under you because for every action there’s an equal– John: Totally. Craig: Like when there’s a moment in one of The Avengers movie where – maybe the first one – where Tony Stark is falling as regular Tony Stark out of his skyscraper and then the suit catches up to him and he turns it on and repels upwards about 20 feet above people. And I always think they’re dead. John: They’re dead. Craig: They’re dead. Forget even heat. Even if you have a heat-less thing, the fact that it is stopped that amount of acceleration means that they would be crushed. Crushed. John: Yeah. Crushed. Craig: Crushed. John: All right. So let’s take a look at fixing plot holes. If we have identified plot holes let’s fix some of them. So getting back to that earlier question, the outline stage is the perfect place to notice some of these plot holes and fix them before you start writing. You will do yourself so many favors if you recognize like, oh, these things are supposed to be simultaneous so therefore it needs to be daytime both places. Or how would she get from this place to this place? If you are outlining this is a time where you will catch a lot of those things. The third Arlo Finch I outlined much more extensively than previous ones and I did save myself probably a week’s worth of work of torture about how to fix some things because, oh, on an outline I can see this is going to take this amount of time. I can fix some of these problems before I write the problems. Craig: A hundred percent. I don’t have problems when I’m writing a script that are torturous for me ever because I’ve already tortured myself in the outline phase. And I will. I will walk around for weeks trying to solve a problem because it feels wrong and it’s so brutal. But then when you solve it you feel great. And you know you’re going to be OK when you write. Don’t think for a second when you’re outlining that the cleverness, brilliance, beauty of whatever it is you are imagining is going to be able to overcome the plot hole that it is creating. It will not. John: Nope. It will not. Another general piece of good advice I’ve tried to implement in sort of everything I’ve done, especially when I’ve gone and done rewrites on things which you’ve sensed some plot holes there is whenever possible take away the question rather than trying to pave over it. So, don’t have a character give an answer to something. Try to preempt the question so the question is never asked. So the audience will never ask that question. And so there was a very complicated thing I was doing that involved time travel and I needed to have a character quite early on establish one rule that took away 90% of the questions that would come up. And so, you know, if you can eliminate questions it’s much better than answering them. Craig: And this is an area I think people who come in to rewrites have an unfair advantage over people that have written before them because when you come into rewrite you have license to say, “You know the solution here is to just get rid of this entire thing. Everybody apparently has fallen in love with it and is dancing around it like it’s the golden calf, but it’s destroying everything around it. It’s creating this need for endless explanations and bendings and contortions to justify it and cover up the damage it’s causing. How about you just get rid of it? And then you have problems whatsoever.” Nothing feels better than a movie that moves in a nice, clean, elegant way without ever stopping you in your tracks to go, wait, wait, hold on, what? Nothing. John: Nothing. Another good solution sometimes if you are looking at a cut of a movie and there’s a plot hole is to always ask yourself could I solve this with a single shot. If a single thing was there and inserted would it take care of it? And this comes from the women who edited one of the Star Trek movies. They were talking about how there was a thing they were encountering in one of the movies and they just pulled out their iPhones and shot one shot and it’s actually apparently in the movie but it solved an issue. It was like a cutaway to a thing, I don’t know if it was a sign that said something, but it made it clear like, oh, it connected some pieces. And sometimes it’s just a single shot or two, three really quick shots to get you over that hump so like, oh, that thing happened. Basically I’m asking for what is the simple solution that gets you through it so you don’t have to explain more. Craig: Yeah. And I think that sometimes what you can do is take a look at the plot hole you have and ask yourself does it even have to be a hole? Maybe this is plot help. Because let’s say – for instance I’m working on something right now and in the story I got to a point where I thought you know what would be very helpful story wise in terms of establishing rules, boundaries, difficulty is if a certain thing were true. The problem is that that thing feels a little plot holey. So, I thought about it for a while and then I thought, OK, I’m going to have somebody say this like it’s true. And I’m going to have the character question it. And in the end we’re going to find out that it was a lie. But I get all of the benefit of having it. John: Totally. Craig: And the lie also made sense, like why this person lied about it. And then you’re the winner. The plot hole suddenly is not a hole at all. John: Yep. So the TV Tropes people will call that a Hand Wave, but it’s actually a very specific Hand Wave. So Hand Wave is when somebody says something that distracts you from the problem and it makes the problem go away. And it sounds like you did an Advanced Hand Wave which is it was distracting you but then ultimately it paid off that the character was lying. So, brilliant. And that’s why you win all the awards. Craig: [laughs] That’s yet to happen, but I did essentially have the character express what I thought the audience would be expressing at that moment which is you know what you’re saying doesn’t actually make sense. And somebody going don’t worry about it, I’ve thought it through, trust me. Which I think for an audience they go, OK, if the character on screen that I’m identifying with is questioning this the movie is aware. This will be explained at some point. And it is. John: Yeah. A related term which Jane Espenson will use, you’ll see in TV Tropes, is Hanging a Lampshade, which basically is like having the characters call a thing out and point out the unlikely nature of it. Basically saying like this is one of those premise kind of things that this is – you got to give me this one, because without this the story doesn’t make sense. Craig: Right. And what you are playing is a psychological game with the audience. You’re saying to them please beat me up a little bit less over this because at least I’m admitting it. I’m not trying to fool you. I’m not insulting your intelligence. I’m just saying, “Hey look it’s happened.” Now, it is not even close to being as good as not being there. John: No. Craig: But it is preferable to suggesting to the audience that what you just told them makes sense when it clearly does not. John: Agreed. Final bit of advice on plot holes is often you are better off just ignoring them. And so rather than trying to fix them it’s acknowledging that some things that a certain percentage of your audience will point out as mistakes, most of your audience will never notice and trying to fix it will actually cause more damage. We said before when you try to fix things you can sometimes call more attention to them and the audience will assume that that patch is more important than the actual material around it. Craig: Right. John: And fixes often just feel like fixes. You and I are probably particularly attentive to looped lines, ADR. We’re looking at character B, but character A says something even though they have their back to us. And it’s clearly just a line that was thrown in there to address some problem. Sometimes it can be done really well and it’s seamless and smooth. But, man, sometimes you just really feel it. Craig: Well, best option is get rid of plot hole. Second best option is turn plot hole to your favor. Third option is fill plot hole somehow. And you’re right, sometimes it’s better to just leave it be, depending on the size of it. The danger, and you will see outside people – non-writers – do this almost exclusively is you decide that the way to fix the plot hole is to layer it with other stuff that solves the immediate logic problem. It’s as if they’re saying we have a problem right now not in the movie but in this room that we in this room don’t believe this moment. What can we say in this room to solve “that problem?” And you can come up with something, but it stinks. John: Yeah. Craig: And therein is the danger. Because you can begin filling these things only to realize you were in it and you’re burying yourself under these layers of solution that have absolutely nothing to do with good storytelling, emotions, intentions, theme, adventure, feeling. They literally exist only to answer some dumb question. And if you even sense for a second that’s what’s happening, stop immediately. John: Yeah. You and I have both been in rooms with filmmakers who have made really good movies and a lot of movies who do get tripped up on really frustrating things that they should not be getting tripped up on and are asking for solutions to things that aren’t problems. And that is just really disheartening but it’s also the reality. And so you hear them, you talk through it, you try not to fill the perceived plot hole, but actually design a path that’s not going to take them where they see that plot hole and we’ll still deliver the movie to where it needs to go. It’s really frustrating. Craig: It is. And this by the way is actually one of the more annoying parts of writing anything. Because we are attempting to create a simulation of reality and reality is really complicated. And also reality is reality. So, it is not here to deliver narrative excitement or drama on any given day. It’s here to just function the way it normally functions. So what we’re doing is doubly hard. We’re trying to create reality and we’re trying to create reality on a crazy day. John: Yeah. Craig: And so therefore we want crazy things to happen on the crazy day. But when crazy things happen in reality they happen in accordance with reality. It’s incredibly frustrating. Reality is slow. It unfolds in real time. People aren’t changing in the middle of it. Sometimes there is no particular challenge. It doesn’t care about our storytelling needs. And so we have to figure out how to tell a story in a matrix that doesn’t care about our needs as writers. John: Absolutely. Craig, it’s time for our One Cool Things. What’s yours? Craig: Great question, John. Very, very simple thing that I find myself using constantly. And I don’t know if you do. It comes with the iPhone. It’s the Measure App. Have you used it? John: I’ve used it only once or twice. I always forget that it’s there. Craig: Exactly. You always forget it’s there. Many, many times I’ve gone hunting around my house looking for the tape measure, looking for a ruler. In fact, the Measure App is better than both of those things. The Measure App, which takes about I would say 15 seconds to kind of get going because you need to move your phone around to let it orient itself in space and time, allows you to just place a dot anywhere you want and then you just start walking. And it’s just making a line on the screen using your calendar to lay the dot of the line over reality, AR style. And then when you reach the point where you want to know, OK, how far is this from my first dot, you hit it again, and it tells you. You don’t need another person at the end with a tape measure. You can measure anything this way. It is incredibly useful. And I don’t think it existed until this recent iteration I think of iOS, or nearly recent. So, I use it all the time and I think now that I’ve put this bug in your ear you will too. John: I probably will use it more and more. My belief is that some version of it existed from a third party developer and then Apple just made their own and Sherlocked it. But I agree it’s a really well done thing. My One Cool Thing is an article in Lifehacker by Nick Douglas called Install These Apps on your New Mac. And it’s just a list of the apps you should maybe consider putting on your new Mac. And I liked it because I use most of these apps and it’s a convenient way for me to show some useful things that people should try to put on their Macintosh and at least experiment with. So obviously we use Slack for everything around the office. Dropbox is essential for me. I feel like we need to do a little sidebar on Dropbox at some point because I see people who use Dropbox but they don’t use it to its maximum capability. So I think we’ll save that for a special topic bit. I cannot imagine my life without Dropbox. Craig: Yeah, no, neither can I. John: If you use multiple computers it is just– Craig: Essential. John: Incredibly important. Craig: And we all use multiple computers because at the very least– John: Our phones. Craig: We have a phone and a tablet at a minimum, right? Or a phone and a laptop. So, they are computers and I was very happy to see my beloved 1Password on there as well. John: Oh yeah. Crucial. And so I only was aware of this article because he uses Highland2 for writing and so that was the little new alert that showed up. But I thought the whole article was good. So, anybody who uses Highland2 for their main writing is clearly a genius and so therefore you should take all his other suggestions to heart. Craig, you have a change in your life that you wanted to talk to our listeners about. Craig: I do. I have a big life change coming. I have been in my office here in Old Town Pasadena for I think seven years. John: Your office is terrific. I love your office. It feels old fashioned in the best way. Craig: Well, I need a little bit more space for some things that are happening. And I love this part of Los Angeles. This is Old Town Pasadena. I found a new office just a few blocks away that is even more kind of old school and nifty and LA detective circa 1938. And so I need to help the folks who have this building, I need to help them rent the place that I’m leaving. So, hey, do you want to rent Craig’s office? You can. If you are in the market for an office in Old Town Pasadena, it’s about 500 square feet. It’s got two rooms, separated by a door. You could do worse. John: You could do worse. Craig: So if you’re looking for something like that go ahead and email us at [email protected]. And we’ll connect you up with the folks that are showing the office. I will not be in it, so don’t expect to see me there, but that’s sort of the good news. You won’t have to deal with me. John: It’s very, very good news. And it is a beautiful office and I think it would be good for a writer or writers who wanted to use it for offices, but it would also be good for like a psychologist or somebody. Because it has a front waiting room and then a closed back office. So it’s good for that. Craig: Exactly. It can be all sorts of things. John: That’s our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by James Llonch and Jim Bond. If you have an outro you can send us a link to [email protected]. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions, or requests for Craig’s office space. For short questions we’re on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. You can find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there, leave us a comment. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com, which I think will be redesigned by the time this episode comes up. We did a big relaunch of the site. So if it’s not up Tuesday when this drops, it will be up shortly thereafter. It will look nice. I think you’ll like it. Craig: It’s going to be a whole new johnaugust.com? John: It’s pretty different, so I think you’ll enjoy it. Craig: No, I don’t like change. John: No change at all. So here’s one of the things I’ll say one of the goals. Because Scriptnotes posts are so big it just looked like a site that was only about Scriptnotes. And so Scriptnotes have their own column but they’re not the main topic of the site. Craig: Hmm. Feels backwards to me. I think it should be all Scriptnotes with a small, tiny digital ghetto for whatever your personal musings are. But, yes, I believe Scriptnotes – I have a new vision. Somebody must own Scriptnotes.com I assume, right? John: They do. Yeah. Craig: Jerks. John: Jerks. But on johnaugust.com you’ll also find transcripts. We get them up about four days after the episode airs. You can find all the back episodes at Scripnotes.net. And you subscribe there and you get all of the back catalog episodes. The first 381 episodes of the show. And the bonus episodes. Craig: I mean, what a deal. John: What a deal. Thank you for another fun week. Craig: Thank you, John. I’ll see you next week. John: Bye. Links: Join us for the WGA’s Princess Bride screening on January 27th. The Seattle Live Show is on February 6th! You can now preorder Arlo Finch in the Lake of the Moon or come to the launch event on February 9th. Scriptnotes, Ep 383: Splitting the Party Scriptnotes, Ep 3: Kids, cards, whiteboards and outlines Plot Holes on Wikipedia and TV Tropes. You can find examples at Movie Plot Holes The perils of coincidence Measure App on iPhone Install These Apps on your New Mac by Nick Douglas for Lifehacker T-shirts are available here! We’ve got new designs, including Colored Revisions and Highland. John August on Twitter Craig Mazin on Twitter John on Instagram Find past episodes Scriptnotes Digital Seasons are also now available! Outro by James Llonch and Jim Bond (send us yours!) Email us at [email protected] post Scriptnotes, Ep 384: Plot Holes — Transcript first appeared on John August.

The original post for this episode can be found here. John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin. John: And this is Episode 378 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast we’re going to dash hopes, ruin friendships, and destroy things we love most. Craig: Oh, thank god. John: As we talk about why bad things need to happen to characters we love. Plus, we’ll be answering questions about WGA signatories and old TV scripts. Craig: Well that sounds fun. John: Yeah, Craig, it’s nice to have you back. Craig: It’s good to be back. I’m so sorry I missed – since I’ve been working and traveling, you’re working and traveling, and then I had some needle shoved into my spine last week. John: Oh, no, not good. Don’t do that. Craig: It wasn’t an accident. It was on purpose. There was a medical professional doing it. John: All the kids are doing it. Craig: All the kids are doing it. John: Yeah, just inject – first it was Juuls, and then they’re injecting things into their spines. Craig: Exactly. So that was why. Initially it was supposed to happen first thing in the morning and our podcast interview with Phil and Matt was going to be in the afternoon, and then they had an adjustment. So when I got out of that thing I was about two hours away from doing the podcast and just feeling really weird and oogie. So, yeah, but I’m back. I’m back. John: He’s back. He’s no longer oogie. He’s full of boogie. And you can see Craig in person on December 12th which is tomorrow as this episode comes out. We are doing our live show in Hollywood. Our guests are fantastic. Zoanne Clack of Grey’s Anatomy, Pamela Ribon of Ralph Breaks the Internet. Cherry Chevapravatdumrong of Family Guy and The Orville, plus Phil Lord and Chris Miller of Lego Movie and the new Spider Man: Into the Spider-Verse. So we are hyping this show, but for all I know we’re sold out and it’s just– Craig: We should be based on that list of people. By the way, Zoanne Clack I think is a medical doctor. John: She’s a medical doctor. So if Craig has an emergency, she’s the person. Craig: We’ll be talking about my spine on that show. But this is an amazing lineup of people. Totally – everybody from different places – well, we do have three representatives of animation come to think of it. All right. All right. Lord and Miller, I mean, boom, Pam Ribon has got this huge movie out. Everybody is famous. And you know what? Why would anyone not want to go to this show? Plus, me and you. John: Well that’s us. I mean, that’s the other celebrities in this whole thing. Craig: Yeah. John: Sometimes we like try to land a big name and then it’s like, you know what, let us be the big names sometimes. Craig: We’re the big name. John: Zoanne Clack, yes, she’s a medical doctor, but what I really want to talk to her about on the show is how she’s transitioned from being a doctor to writing a show about doctors. Because we get so many questions from listeners about like “I am a police detective, but I want to write detective stories.” And that’s an interesting, fascinating transition. She has done it, so she will be able to tell us what that life is like. Craig: Maybe she can also chat a little bit about our episode where we went through all the mistakes that, like the fake medicine on TV. I wonder if she’s ever – well, you know what, let’s save the Zoanne questions for when we’re with Zoanne. John: Absolutely. We also have another live show to announce. I’m very excited to announce that we are doing a screening of Princess Bride and an episode afterwards in which we’ll be talking about the movie we just saw. So, William Goldman passed away this past month. We are going to be doing a series of screenings for the WGA. This is going to be at the WGA Theater on January 27th. So, Craig and I will watch the movie then discuss the movie afterwards with the audience. And so this is I think going to be open up to everyone. So once there are tickets there will be a link in the show notes for that. I’m very excited to do that. Craig: Yeah. Me too. It’s one of my favorite movies and William Goldman was a giant. So it’ll be nice. It’ll be nice to do that in his memory. John: Absolutely. And so this will be kind of a trial run also because I’d like to do more of these on the whole. So if this goes well there’s some movies down the road I want to do a deep dive on. We’ll screen them and then do a deep dive. So we’ll let this be a test run. Craig: Brilliant. John: Brilliant. We have some follow up. First is from Partis about the Start Button. Craig, do you want to take this? Craig: Sure. OK, so Pardis writes, “The problem with the system you outlined on the podcast where the WGA can be the bad guy if you ask them to, calling the studio on your behalf to enforce the terms of your writing agreement is that the studio knows the WGA is only calling because you, the writer, have asked them to. And since writers are more dispensable than directors, yes, you can get labeled as a diva or as a problem child or as more trouble than you’re worth and lose out on future writing assignments as a result. So, what’s the solution?” Pardis says, “A system whereby the WGA is alerted to commencement on a feature automatically. And a system whereby the WGA checks on progress for all feature products automatically without asking the writer first. That way the studio can’t blame any specific writer for asking the guild to be the bad guy. There’s just automatic oversight across the board. But, how can we put this system into place if the guild isn’t already alerted to commencement automatically? “Option number 1: Negotiate a meaningful financial penalty into the next contract for studios that fail to file their paperwork for new project with an X number of days of the agreement being signed. That money can go toward covering the guild’s increased oversight and enforcement costs. “Option number 2: Create a small financial penalty for writers who fail to alert the WGA that they’ve started work on a new project. Option 2, because then the studio can’t get mad at writers for alerting the WGA about new projects because writers have no choice but to inform the WGA directly less the writers be penalized themselves.” John: All right, so let’s take a look at Pardis’ suggestions here and sort of how Pardis is laying out the situation. So, I think what Pardis is suggesting overall have some merit to it. You want the WGA to be the bad guy. You want the WGA to step up and do this work on behalf of writers. And if it feels like the WGA is only calling the studio or only getting involved because the writer complained I can understand that hesitation. That said, the goal is for this to feel like it is just automatic. It’s like changing the way we’re just doing this on a regular basis. And so that even without a financial penalty for failing to hit the Start Button and report a new project, that it will become a matter of course for writers to do this. And the WGA has increased already the number of enforcement people there are to do that work. And so they are going to be checking up on people anyway. And so regardless of hitting the Start Button or not hitting the Start Button, there’s a lot more outreach to say like, hey, what are you working on, how is this going, and are you being paid on time? Is anything going on? And that is one of the overall goals and functions of the WGA is to make sure that our members are being paid and are treated appropriately. Craig: These ideas, all ideas really, have been discussed ad nauseam since I have been involved in WGA stuff, which is, you know, over 14 years ago or something. But I would say that Pardis you’re not the first person to suggest that we should maybe start penalizing writers. But good luck. It’s not a great idea, honestly, to essentially crack down on writers to solve the problem that is created by studios. We already have enough problems. You’re dealing with writers that are already being abused and now they have to send money to the guild because they’ve been abused? It’s not great. Can you get a meaningful financial penalty for studios that fail to file their paperwork? No. Probably not. And again when things start is kind of fuzzy. So, the Start Button actually is the best idea I’ve seen to date. And I think it will bear fruit. So I would say, Pardis, patience. John: Related aspect here is that when you are hitting a Start Button or even now if you’re not hitting the Start Button, you are supposed to upload your contracts. And so I have been uploading my contracts. Everyone is supposed to upload their contracts that show all the steps of your deal. When the WGA has this information they can be checking on it independently so they don’t need to necessarily wait for you to say that there’s a problem. They can say like, hey, according to what we have this is what’s happening on this project – is this accurate? And you need to answer that honestly. And so that is a way in which the WGA can become involved, even if you are not reaching out to them to say help me here. Craig: Yeah. Hopefully this works the way we would want it to in an ideal situation where the guild is helping you without feeling like they’re bonking you on the head. And in getting in your work process. So, let’s see how it goes. John: Second bit of follow up, a previous One Cool Thing was the show Please Like Me. And last night I was out and randomly bumped into Josh Thomas the creator and star of Please Like Me. And so I want to talk a little bit about sort of what to do when you meet somebody who you’ve only seen their work in person. Because it can be sometimes kind of awkward. So what I did is I said, “Oh hey, you don’t know me, but I thought your show was fantastic and you do great work.” I asked him if he moved to Los Angeles fulltime and is writing here and he is. And then I left him be and let him sort of go on and be about his night. So maybe we’ll get him on the show at some point and he can talk about what he’s doing here. But as a person who gets approached like Josh Thomas gets approached in that situation I want to talk about sort of best practices when you’re going up to talk to someone whose work you admire, but it’s in a social situation. Because, Craig, you must encounter this, too. Craig: Yeah, I mean, it’s not on a daily basis by any stretch of the imagination, but it does happen. And mostly people seem to do it well. You know, I haven’t had any weird encounters. Any actor that’s on television has astronomically more of these encounters than you or I. And my guess is just that numbers wise they’re going to run into some odd ducks, probably at least once a day. John: Yeah. So I would just say I would encourage – if there’s a person who is doing great work and you want to say like, oh, I really like the thing you’re doing. It’s good to say that, because sometimes it’s just good to hear that you’re making stuff that the world appreciates. But I would say if you’re going to make that approach plan for an out that’s going to get you out of that conversation within 30 seconds to a minute, because they were going about their life before you interrupted them. And so you want to be able to say what you need to say and then like let them go off and do their thing. If they want to keep engaged, they can engage. But make sure you’re giving them the release to get out of the conversation. Craig: And take a look at their face before you walk up to them, because listen, everybody is a person. Everybody is going through stuff. Sometimes we’re in a nice happy mood, sometimes we’re in a neutral state of mind. Sometimes we’re concerned, we’re running late, we’re sad, we’re nervous. And then we don’t want anyone talking to us. Anyone, by the way. Much less people that we don’t know. So, just take a look. I know it’s hard because – and again, this isn’t something that I think anyone has towards somebody like me – but when people see a movie star in their minds they think you know what it doesn’t matter how they’re feeling and it doesn’t matter what’s going on. This is my moment to shake Tom Cruise’s hand and I’m doing it. Because the rest of my life I shook Tom Cruise’s hand, right? I had that moment. And he’ll get over it and he will. He will. But, you know, it’s not that big – who cares? I guess that’s my whole thing is like who cares. John: My ground zero for getting recognized, well of course Austin Film Festival I get recognized a lot there, which is – I sort of go there knowing that’s going to happen. The lobby of the ArcLight I get spotted a lot. And sometimes at the Grove. And there was one time I was walking through the lobby of the ArcLight and this guy goes, “Wait, you’re that writer guy. You’re good.” I’m like, OK. I guess I’m good. Thank you, random stranger. That’s nice. Craig: You’re that writer guy. Well, that’s pretty much right. This is one of the nice things about living in La Cañada is that nobody cares. Nobody cares. They don’t care. John: Let’s get to our marquee topic which is bad things and bad things happening to the characters that you love. This came up for me this morning because I was working through the third book of Arlo Finch and I was looking at my outline and just looking at how many bad things happen, which is just a tremendous number. I think partly because it is the third and final book, so if something could happen this is the last place where it could happen. But also the character has grown to a place where he can handle some things that he couldn’t otherwise handle. So, there’s a lot of serious stuff that happens in the third book. But I want to talk about it because I think there’s this instinct to sort of protect our heroes, protect our characters, and it’s hard to sort of get us over the hump of like, no, no, no, you have to – not just allow bad things to happen but make bad things happen to your heroes in order to generate story. And this is really very much probably more a feature conversation than a television conversation because in ongoing series there will be conflict within an episode, but you won’t destroy everything in their life every week. But in features that’s a really important part. Craig: It’s a huge part. And, yes, you’re right. In television you need to make sure that people come back the next week in roughly the same shape you found them. So there will be little mini ups and downs. But in movies we feel narratively like we have to see people torn apart. And this goes all the way back to the bible. John: Oh, the bible. Craig: The story of Job. John: Tell me the story of Job. Craig: I will. And I should mention I don’t believe in anything in the bible. However, the bible is evidence of something. And it is evidence I think of deep seeded instinctive narrative patterns in the human mind. They are expressions of these things that are in us. They are not always sensible or logical, but they are there. So, that’s how I’m going to take a look at the story of Job. It’s a very simple story. Job is a very pious guy. He believes in God. He’s just super godly. And God therefore rewards him with a fortune and health and, I don’t know, bountiful crops, or I don’t know, whatever God would give people. And God is hanging out one day with Satan, as he used to do, and Satan says, “You know, Job only loves you because you reward him.” And this is a general moral conundrum that has been dissected over time. You watch The Good Place, right? John: Oh yeah. It’s fantastic. Craig: Of course, so they refer to this as moral dessert. The idea that you behave well so that you get your reward from whatever metaphysical/supernatural deity you believe in. And God says, “No, no, no, no, no. Job loves me because he’s a good guy. And I’ll prove it. I will remove my protection from him and you go ahead and do whatever you want to him. And you’ll see. He’ll stand by me.” And so that’s what happens. God removes his protection and Satan begins to torment Job – torment him – torment his health, and ruin his crops, and scatter his children. It’s just awful. Like every bad thing you could do to somebody he does to Job. And Job just stands by God. And in the end, you’re the winner Job, and God rerewards him and gives him even more crops and frankincense or whatever they had back then. So, why am I bringing up the story of Job? Because there’s a moral inherent to it that I think is why we need, narratively, to torture our characters. And the idea is that our goodliness or our growth or whatever you want to call the evolution of our selves, the betterment of our selves, it doesn’t count to other people unless it is perceived to come at terrible cost. Now, is that actually true? I don’t think so. I think it’s perfectly possible to become a better person without suffering. But when it comes to narrative it seems like we need it or we don’t believe the change. John: Yeah. We didn’t see the work. We didn’t see the struggle. We didn’t see sort of the cost and it doesn’t feel like it was merited. Craig: Exactly. So what we like to see is somebody that has experienced a trauma and they’re going to get over the trauma but only by facing it in the most hard and difficult way. They are going to repair a relationship with somebody by that person leaving them. They’re going to appreciate what they have because they lose it all. So, every character starts with this flaw and then we as the writers we torment them and force them to confront it through a series of increasingly difficult trials the way that Satan did to Job. And through that there is this falling apart. Break you down to lift you up. And we call this the low point. The low point in a movie is the low point because the writer has tortured the hero to the point where they give up. They finally give up. That’s what you have to do is – you’ve lost your, whatever your ego is, and your hubris, and you give up and from that you will rise back. But those moments are so notable. And one of my favorite versions of that is the Team America puke scene which is just perfect. It’s perfect. John: Let’s play a clip from the Team America puke scene. [Clip plays] So this scene classically is a character who has lost everything and then sort of loses more and in this case is literally vomiting up the last they have left. But let’s talk about some of those things that a character can lose and list off some of those classic things you’ll see characters losing here. Some bad things might be to take away their home. So you might literally burn it down, or you might cast them out of society. You might take away their support system, so taking away their friends, their family, the institutions, the organizations that they’re a part of. You might have the rest of the world see them as the villain. And so you have a hero who is being perceived as the villain which is horrible. Incarcerate them. I have a note here sort of incarceration, also the weird case of Paul Manafort at this moment. So as we’re recording this, this is a guy who is going to probably be in jail for the rest of his life and he’s acting really strangely which leads me to believe that there’s something else he could lose, which is always fascinating to speculate on that. There’s something worse than being in prison for all this time and so he’s acting on behalf of that. So figuring out what that is. You can kill a character. You can lop off a limb. You can force them to act against their own beliefs, so classically they have the daughter kidnapped and so therefore they have to do things that they can’t believe. You can sew tension and conflict between their allies. You can destroy the item they love most, so it’s like he finally gets that car he’s been hoping for his all his life and you destroy that thing. So, those losses are bad things you’re doing to your character and they’re pretty crucial. If you don’t do some of those kinds of things over the course of your movie it’s probably not a movie. Craig: Yeah. I mean, what you’re doing is burning away what needs to be burned away. And it’s unpleasant. And we need it to be unpleasant. We need to see this character suffer. What is it, hamartia I think is the Greek word for suffering. And then catharsis is essentially vomiting. Which is one of the reasons why I like that scene so much because they just did it. Humiliation is something that we see all the time. The writer creates circumstances in which the hero is humiliated. Where they lose all sense of self-worth and pride. We can kill or harm the people they love the most. We can make them feel terribly guilty and confront them with the consequences of what they’ve done. It’s good because it’s tortuous. There’s that scene, people of our age always remember this moment in the second Superman movie from the late ‘70s/early ‘80s where Superman willingly gives up his power so that he can marry Lois Lane. And he gets beaten up by some guy in a bar. And it’s crushing. It’s crushing because you see someone brought low. I remember seeing that scene in the theater and feeling terrible inside. And it was the same feeling I had when I watched the animated The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe when all the evil Snow Queen and her minions shave the mane off of Aslan. John: Yeah. Craig: Take his hair away and reduce him to just this pathetic wretch. And, yeah, it’s – you need it. You need it or else when they come back you don’t feel anything. John: Yeah. So let’s talk about the timing of when these bad things happen, because there’s a couple different moments over the course of a movie where you see these things happening classically. So, the first is the inciting incident or whatever you want to call that moment early in the story that sort of kicks this story into gear. And so, you know, in the first 10 to 15 minutes of a story where a change has happened. This is the village is raided and the hero’s parents are killed. This is a big change has happened that is starting this story with this character. Often the end of act one. So you’ve arrived at a new place. We’re not in Kansas anymore. The hero’s house has burnt down. We’re entering a new world. There’s a big change and the hero has lost something. They may be excited about what they’re headed towards, but there is a loss. They’ve crossed into a place where they can’t get back to where they were before. There’s a lot of times, moments in the second act that are going to be losses, where allies turn on them, where new obstacles arise. There’s a plan that fails, seeing things that were important to the character that we were hoping for for the character don’t come true. And then classically the biggest of these losses, which is probably the vomit scene from Team America, is the end of act two, sort of the worst of the worst, which is you’ve gotten to this point and you’ve lost everything. It should generally be the character’s lowest point, or at least the lowest point in this character and how they’ve evolved over the course of the story. That thing that looked like it was potentially in their reach has been taken away from them. And that’s classically the end of the second act. Craig: It’s the end because there’s nothing left to lose. You, the writer, have beaten it all out of them. They have no pride left. They have no resources. Or whatever it is. You’ve removed the stuff that they were relying on. Their crutches are all gone. It’s important to note that when you visit these bad things on your character you must do so sadistically. It’s not enough to just have some bad things happen. You have to do them in a way that is deeply ironic and miserable. Especially miserable. Because then oddly the more exquisite the torture the more we feel positively when they overcome it. So, the example I always think about is Marlin at the beginning of Finding Nemo. He’s a happy fish and he’s there with his wife and their hundreds of little babies. And they’ve found a place to live. And then his wife is eaten and all of the babies are eaten except for one. And that is very bad. But then Pixar understood it’s not bad enough. They have to make that little one disabled. They have to give him a bad fin so that he will need even more protection. And then that’s not enough. He is the one that goes missing. And so you have to go get him. And that’s not enough. In the end you have to let him go into more danger to save a friend. And then that’s not enough. You have to feel like he died there. And in that moment where Marlin thinks that Nemo is dead, he flashes back to holding him as a little egg and if you’re human you cry. Because the torture has been so exquisite. And therefore the relief and joy is beautiful and our appreciation for how far Marlin has come as a character is real. They earned it. Did I ever tell the story of Jose Fernandez, the pitcher? John: No. Tell me. Craig: So this sort of goes to what I think of as the essential ingredient of character torture is irony. It’s not enough to just sort of make bad things happen. You have to do it in a way that feels ironic, as if the world had conspired against them. So, it’s a guy named Jose Fernandez. Like a lot of baseball players he came from Cuba. So he had to escape from Cuba and he escaped on a small boat with – it was one of these crowded boats full of refugees and at some point on the voyage the boat gets tossed and turned and someone says, “Someone has gone overboard,” and without even thinking Jose Fernandez just jumps into the ocean to save whoever that person is. And he does. He grabs them. He brings them back on board. He pulls them up. They live. And it turns out that the person he saved was his own mother. He didn’t even know it. He arrives in the United States and he becomes a baseball player. Not just a baseball player. He is an amazing pitcher. He plays for the Marlins. He is fantastic. He is going to earn many, many hundreds of millions of dollars. So, just the kind of dream come true for somebody that had to escape Cuba on a small boat and rescue his mother from drowning. Unfortunately, two years ago he died. He died in an accident. And if I told you that he died in a car accident you would think that’s bad. But he didn’t die in a car accident. He died in a boating accident. John: Oh my. Craig: And that is ironic in a terrible way. It implies that the universe was doing something. It had its thumbs on the scale so to speak. It is tortuous to think of. And when we write our terrible tortures for our characters I think it’s important for us to think of that. Because – and it’s a sad thing of course – but the worse it is and the more ironic it is the better the ending feels. John: Yeah. Well let’s talk about sort of how those bad things come into the story. Because I can think of three main ways you see those bad things happening. The first is an external event. So that’s the earthquake. That’s the world war. In Finding Nemo that is the – is it a shark who eats the fish originally? Craig: No, he gets grabbed by some fishermen who are looking to capture fish to sell, like for aquariums. John: No, but at the very start of the movie where– Craig: Oh yeah, it’s like a barracuda or something like that. John: So that’s really an external threat because that – so barracuda is not the primary villain of the story. I don’t remember Finding Nemo that well. That barracuda itself never comes back. Craig: Correct. It was just nature. John: It’s nature actually. So some external force that you cannot actually defeat comes back. But sometimes it is the villain itself who is the character who arrives who is the one who is causing the suffering. So, every James Bond movie. Many fairy tales. Die Hard is an example. So, there’s a personified threat. A villain who is doing the thing that is causing the suffering. That is beginning the suffering. But in some of my favorite movies it is the hero themselves that is doing the action that is causing the problem. So if you look at Inside Out or Ralph Breaks the Internet or Toy Story, it is the hero who is causing the problem. The hero who is ultimately responsible for the suffering that the characters are going through. And that’s often great writing. Because it gets back to the idea of like what is the character’s flaw and something about that character’s flaw is causing the suffering. And we see them having to address that flaw in order to stop the suffering. Craig: No question. It’s very common with Pixar movies. In fact, I’m hard pressed to think of a Pixar movie where the bad stuff is majority villain driven other than Bug’s Life, where Kevin Spacey, a real life villain, portrayed a villainous grasshopper. But typically in Pixar films – and sort of I guess in The Incredibles, but yeah, mostly they bring it upon themselves because it is more interesting. John: I mean, in The Incredibles movies there’s sort of an attenuated thing where it’s like it’s because of past actions, it’s a boomerang effect that sort of comes back in, but it’s not a thing we saw them do at the start of the movie. It’s not generally responsible for most of the suffering. Craig: Right. John: But movies are about consequences and if characters are allowed to freely make choices and then have to suffer the consequences of those choices, that is good and appropriate and compelling storytelling, especially for a feature which is something that is designed to happen just once. So, a television show theoretically should be able to repeat itself ad nauseam. A feature is sort of a one-time journey for a character. And so that one-time journey is going to about big steps and big swings and big failures when they happen. Craig: No question. John: So some takeaway on this idea of bad things happening to your characters. I would say really as you’re breaking a story you have to be thinking about what are the biggest worst things that could happen. And when I say the biggest worst things that are in the universe of your story. So, obviously you can’t stick a tornado in space. But within the context of your movie what are those and what are the character effects for it? I think so often when we get notes about like well the stakes feel light here, sometimes the proposed solution is to make it be – it’s the end of the world. Like if we don’t do this then everyone else around us dies. I think that sometimes that’s mistaking the bigger scale for more personal consequences for the things that the characters are going through. So, making sure that it feels like a punishment very specifically tailored to this character that you’ve created. Craig: Exactly. And you don’t have to – you don’t have to substitute volume of badness for quality of badness. In the beginning of John Wick the bad guys basically kill his dog. Which in and of itself would be like OK that’s bad, except it was the last gift he received from his deceased wife. That’s all it takes. I’m good. And, you know, it doesn’t have to be this massive visitation of problems. Sometimes it’s just the cruelty of it really. Little bits of cruelty. John: The Wizard of Oz, she’s trying to take Toto away at the start. That horrible woman is trying to bicycle away with Toto. That’s horrible. And that’s absolutely the right scale of problem for that movie so before the tornado comes that is what we’re experiencing. We can see it from Dorothy’s eyes like this is one of the worst things she can imagine ever happening. Craig: A lot of times I do think about The Wizard of Oz when people start harping on stakes in meetings. Because I’m like what are the stakes exactly? What are the stakes? John: There aren’t stakes in a classic way. It’s not like the Lollipop Guild was being horribly oppressed. It’s not like there was – she ended up changing the world but kind of by accident. Craig: Yeah. I mean, I guess the stakes were that she would get killed or something. I don’t know. But yeah, it doesn’t matter. Sometimes it’s really more about how closely we empathize with the character and the stakes are whatever is stakey to them. It’s about what makes them feel. And if you make me feel what they’re feeling, those are stakes. That counts. John: Absolutely. In a previous discussion we talked about want and want versus need, which I think is a false dichotomy. But when characters express their wants they have a positive vision of the future. So they can imagine a future and in that future their life is better because they have this thing that they want. And that’s a positive vision. Fear is a negative vision of the future. And so they are afraid. They’ve seen the future and in the future their life is worse because this thing has happened or has been taken away from them. That’s really what we’re talking about with these things we’re trying to – these horrors we’re trying to visit upon our characters is that those things that they feared or those things they didn’t even think they had to fear, those are happening to them now in this story and they have to figure out how to deal with it. Craig: Absolutely. John: All right. Let’s get to some listener questions. First off is James in Napier, New Zealand. I assume it’s Napier, but maybe it’s pronounced a different way. It feels like one of those words where it could be Napier, or Napier. Craig: I think it’s probably Napier. John: Napier. James writes, “How in god’s name do you make sure a TV script is the right length? There’s a lot of flexibility in how feature film scripts can run. I know the one-minute per page rule is a rough guide when you’re writing. TV and radio are much more time-constrained so how do you make sure the script is exactly the right length to start with? And how do you keep it that way during production?” Craig, you just went through TV. Craig: Yeah. We’re doing this right now. Don’t panic over here, James. It’s no big deal. Generally speaking, you know, we’ve got this rough 30-page/60-page guideline for half an hour or an hour. But the truth of the matter is it’s all guess work. The pages don’t really conform clearly to one-minute per page. Things are going to get cut. Some things are going to be expanded. The good news is that we don’t really live in the world where the vast majority of television is constrained by rigid time formats. Everything is far more loosey-goosey now which is nice. If you’re writing for network television, different story. But with that point I would say, again, don’t panic. You can edit. And you can speed things up or slow them down editorially. So just generally, you know, get roughly in that zone and that’s what it will be. And, you know, my experience at least with Chernobyl so far is that the scripts – at least for the first four episodes – are around 59 to 63 pages and they’re all timing out to be about an hour. John: It does work that way. I was talking with Rob Thomas, the creator of Veronica Mars and iZombie and other shows and Rob hates the one-page-per-minute rule because he feels that sometimes networks try to value it too much. And so the way he writes it doesn’t really match up that well. He believes that you could probably actually do a word count that would more accurately reflect how long something really will take to fill. I don’t know if that’s true, but I think it’s an interesting experiment. The truth though is that once you start making a show, so iZombie or Crazy Ex-Girlfriend or any of Derek’s Chicago shows, they know. Ultimately they get a sense of like, OK, our scripts need to be about this length because this is what the episodes cut out to be. And even then there will be episodes that are running long for a while and they have to find way to get two minutes out of it. And when we had the Game of Thrones creators on, Benioff and Weiss, they were talking about how in the first season their episodes were too short. They didn’t understand sort of how long stuff was going to play. And so they needed to add additional scenes to sort of fill them out because they just didn’t have a sense of how long an episode was going to be based on the script page. Craig: Exactly. All right. Joe has a question. He writes, “I am a WGA member. I have an offer on the table from a reputable Middle Eastern production company looking to produce a more Western style show. The offer is about 15% less than WGA minimums. They won’t go any higher because they say lower budgets and the Arabic-speaking portion of the MENA territory,” Middle East, I don’t know, “simply doesn’t support it. I asked the WGA and they said flatly I cannot work for any company who is not a WGA signatory. “I asked my reps and was told the WGA does not have jurisdiction here and becoming a signatory should not be what stands in the way of signing this deal. To be honest, the WGA response rubbed me the wrong way because it felt like they were using me to gain signatories when they didn’t have anything to lose and I did. A job. “That said, I owe a lot to the WGA. I’m eking out a meager living as a writer and I recognize the WGA is part of that. But I don’t have so much work that I can just turn stuff down willy-nilly. So, does the WGA actually have jurisdiction here?” John, what do you think? John: I think there’s probably some situation in which you can be hired by a foreign company as a WGA member and they don’t have to pay you minimums. But this is probably not one of those situations. I know there’s international working rules, essentially one of the things the WGA needs to make sure never happens is that international companies sort of come in and sort of scoop up American writers to really write American things but try to pay them less than that. So I think that is why the WGA’s response is that. But, Craig, you know more about the rules. Tell me. Craig: Well, I have an understanding here, but it will be interesting. I would love to get the WGA’s official position on this. My understanding is that the WGA here is correct. The issue is that Joe is here and the WGA’s jurisdiction covers the United States. It is chartered by the Department of Labor. So, if you are a member of the WGA and you are writing something here in the United States it has to be for a WGA signatory. You cannot go lower than that. Period. The end. Assuming that there is an applicable collective bargaining agreement which obviously there is here. So, no, you can’t do that. Listen, Sony, right, owns Columbia. We call them Sony now. Well obviously Sony is a Japanese company. So why wouldn’t Sony just start saying everybody who works for Columbia Pictures, we’re actually employing you under the Japanese branch of Sony, so you don’t have to do WGA. No. That doesn’t work that way. At all. John: So I suspect that where we could get to with Joe is if this company was willing to fly you over to the Middle East and put you up there and you were doing your writing services there– Craig: Yep. John: They could pay you less than that and that would not be a great situation for you. So not only are you giving up 15% of this money, which by the way 15% of scale is not a ton of money. I just feel like they could find that money for you. But, you are giving up your credit protections. You are giving up kind of all the stuff. Health and pension. You’re giving up much more than you sort of think to take that job. So that is why we have protections like this so that you cannot be undercut by a foreign thing. So could this company form a WGA signatory? Yes they could. It would be great if they did. Craig: Yeah. I don’t think the WGA, by the way, Joe is using you to get this company to sign up as a signatory. I don’t think they care about this company. I think they care about everybody else that’s in the WGA and the value of our minimums not being degraded. So, what I would say here is you can say to them, listen, this isn’t me asking you for anything. I’m not allowed to do this. And, by the way, company, if you come here to the United States you can’t get anybody in the WGA to do this. None of us will be able to do this. You’re going to have get a non-WGA writer. So, you know, which generally speaking won’t probably be as good. So, that’s where they’re at, Joe. John: All right. Kofi from Woodbridge, New Jersey writes, “My question pertains to the release of completed scripts after a television show has aired or a movie has been released to the public. Who decides whether or not the completed script will ever be released? I’d love to read the script for every episode of my favorite shows, but usually only the scripts for the pilot and episodes selected for awards are available. Movie scripts can be hit or miss, too. Why isn’t every script made available to be read for educational purposes?” Craig: Well, there are certain circumstances where the writers actually have the publication rights over screenplays. If you have separated rights in feature films that means you have a Story By or Written By credit then I believe you have the right to publish your screenplay. But, look, by and large they don’t do it because it takes time and it costs some amount of money and it takes some tiny bit of effort and they’re just not willing. It’s no one’s job. It’s a massive company and they can look around and who wants to be the person responsible for scanning and posting 4,000 screenplays. Nobody wants to do it. And there isn’t really a huge clamoring for it, which, you know, is a bit of a bummer. That said, there are plenty of kind of underground swap meets for these things online. I’ve seen them around. So, yeah, it would be nice. But it comes down to sheer laziness and lack of interest, I think. John: So, the situation is actually a lot different than it was 25 years ago when Craig and I were starting. I remember when I arrived at USC for film school they had a script library. You could go down and could check out two scripts from this library and they were literally printed bound scripts. Not even brads in them, but these special posts that sort of like are sturdier than brads. You could check them out and read them and take them back in. And it was a great experience for me to read all of these scripts from classic movies I loved but also things that had never been produced and it was a really good experience. So, I think reading scripts is fantastic. But, now there’s the Internet and now there are PDFs of screenplays. And so while Kofi can’t find all the screenplays he wants to read, he can find a ton of them. I mean, even just in Weekend Read we have hundreds of scripts. Things that are going for awards, those are posted online and those things are easy to find. It’s harder to find the scripts for movies that are not sort of award contenders. But, you can kind of find them. But Kofi’s more interesting point is he wants to read the episodic scripts. Those are harder to find. You tend to find pilots or just those marquee episodes of things. And it’s great to read the normal episodes. That’s one of those things where it actually is much easier to do if you are in this town. Because then you just have networks and assistants at places who can get you copies of scripts. They’re not really under lock and key. They don’t have a lot of value in and of themselves. You can’t do anything with the scripts and so no one is trying to sort of keep them from you. But what Craig said is like it’s no one’s job to publish them or post them. That’s why they don’t happen. Craig: That’s why they don’t happen. Well, keep looking. And by the way, Kofi, spent a lot of time in the mall over there in Woodbridge myself, so just waving hi to you back there in the old country. And we’ve got one more question here from Cory right here in LA who writes, “I’ve got an award-winning short film and I just hired a screenwriter to adapt it into a feature. Though I’ve come up with much of the story, he will be hitting the keys to bring the story and script together. I am a one-man production band with a small production company. I’d like to make sure that I am setting both he and I up for success.” That should be him and I. Setting both him and me. Yeah. Because, right. Anyway. “I’d like to make sure that I’m setting both him and me up for success and possible WGA membership or eligible points toward. First, should or must I make my company a WGA signatory? Second, since I or rather my company is self-financing his writing of the screenplay do I need to adhere to WGA payment standards to allow him eligibility? Finally, if I’m the creator of the original work and I’ve come up and will be credited with Story By is there an opportunity for me to earn WGA points or is that just for the screenwriter?” Oh, excellent list of membership questions there, John. What do you think? John: Absolutely. So, I don’t have all the answers but I will tell you that you’re not the first person to encounter this and I think the WGA has done a much better job over the last ten years dealing with these kinds of situations. I think Howard Rodman deserves a lot of the credit for that. Craig: Yeah. John: What you’re describing is probably a low budget independent film. And if you go to the WGA website there are resources there to talk you through what happens with low budget independent films. Classically these were done outside of WGA jurisdiction. But recognizing that some of the best work was happening there and this was obviously writer’s first work they set up these low budget agreements so that you can do this kind of stuff. That you don’t have to pay people the full amounts for writing services and other things but still allows for things like credit protections. It allows for other parts of what you get with a WGA package for these productions. So, I suspect you will click through on the site, we’ll put a link in the show notes, and see what you need to do and how you sort of put the script into a place where it’s eligible for these low budget agreements. And I don’t think you will have to become a full signatory. I think there’s just ways you can sort of use an associate membership to get you started here. So, it’s good you’re doing it. It’s good you’re thinking about this now. But just read the stuff and then make the thing. Craig: Yeah. Definitely you want to take a look at that low budget independent film agreement. To become a full-fledged WGA signatory there are quite a few hoops to jump through. I mean, it’s not trial by fire or anything, but for instance you need to show that you have enough financial resources to be able to cover your residuals obligations. So in this case because it’s just you and this is just one independent film I think that’s the way to go. Take a look at it. In terms of credit, the original work will be considered source material. It was written outside of the WGA so it will be based on a short film by blah-blah-blah. If you want proper WGA story credit, on the title page of the screenplay it would need to say Screenplay by Jim, Story by Jim and Corey. And that, of course, requires Jim to agree. The truth is the story in the original film is essentially akin to the story in a novel. The novelist doesn’t automatically get WGA credit for the movie of it. They have to actually do some work. So in this case what you would need to do to warrant Story by credit or Shared Story by credit is to work up a written story for the new movie that you’re talking about, either on your own or with the screenwriter that you’re hiring, and then that is now part of this chain of title of the work that’s leading up to this film that would be covered by the independent film low budget agreement. Hopefully that makes sense. John: I think it makes sense. Craig: Great. John: All right, it’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing feels like a Craig One Cool Thing, but it’s the story in the New York Times by Moises Velasquez-Manoff and it’s about how emergency rooms and other medical professionals are starting to examine ketamine as a suicide prevention or a suicide drug for dealing with people who show up suicidal and it seems like it is potentially a quick life-saving drug to be using for people with severe suicide ideation. So, it’s a really nicely written up story about the potential of a drug which we only think of in sort of bad context possibly having some really good uses. Craig: Yeah. It was a fascinating article. Totally my kind of thing. Ketamine is one of these drugs that’s been around for a long time and it’s kind of one of those – I think the World Health Organization has their list of essential medicines, like if you were building your doomsday locker of medicines you’d want ketamine in there. It is a sedative. It is kind of a tranquilizer sort of thing. It can be used anesthetically, you know. And what they found, and I didn’t realize this, but in this article they are saying that very small doses of ketamine can almost stop suicidal ideation in its tracks. So you have somebody coming in who is in severe distress who was just taken by the cops off of the side of a bridge and brought to the emergency room and you give them this tiny injection of ketamine and suddenly they don’t have that anymore. They don’t want to jump. And, now, that doesn’t last obviously, right? So then there’s work to be done after that. But what they’re pointing out is that suicidal ideation, kind of underlying depression, to reverse that pharmacologically with say serotonin reuptake inhibitors takes weeks. Maybe months. Same thing with talk therapy. But if you need to make sure that someone doesn’t hurt themselves over the two, three, four weeks, this may be a viable deal. Now, part of the issue is that it can be used recreationally and if there’s a certain dosage you start to have hallucinations and, you know, psychoactive effects. So, that’s why I think in general people are a little, you know, but we have to kind of get over some of this stuff. You know? John: Absolutely. Craig: Doctors in the emergency rooms are pretty good at figuring out who is there because they’re actually suicidal and who is pretending to be because they feel like getting a ketamine dose. John: You look at sort of this work, you look at work on LSD, you look at work on ecstasy, these are clearly drugs that should be studied for what they can do in a clinical setting and sort of what good can come out of them. But instead they sort of become demonized because of dangerous uses of them recreationally. Craig: Yeah. I mean, we wouldn’t use them recreationally if they didn’t work on some level. So, yeah, obviously how much we use and all the rest. So, anyway, that was really promising. So you did that and I went the other direction. I went all the way over into computer world. So I’ve been playing Red Dead Redemption 2, of course, and I want to call out the people that worked on the environment because it’s so good. It’s the best environment experience I’ve ever had playing a videogame. There was a moment where – it’s not just the detail of the appearance of things, which is quite extraordinary. But it’s the way it interacts sort of synergistically. Just sort of trotting along on my horse and I’m going through sort of a path with some trees on either side and the wind kind of blows and leaves rustle off the trees and kind of swirl in the air around me and then fall to the ground. And I’m like, what? This is getting good. The wind people talked to the tree people. And then the tree people decided, you know what, some leaves come off when wind blows but not a lot of them, not all of them, and how do they come off? And what happens when they go? And it’s perfect. It’s really amazing how well they did with those little things. And you and I know because we work in movies and television how much work goes into making something look effortless. John: Oh yeah. Craig: God only knows how many hours were spent trying to make the wind make the leaves go just right. It’s really well done. So, tip of the hat. My One Cool Thing this week the people that did the environment in Red Dead 2. John: Very nice. Those leaf physicists, they did God’s work there. Craig: Yes. John: That is our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Michael O’Konis. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to [email protected]. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. But short questions are great on Twitter. Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust. You can find the links in the show notes for the things we talked about, so that’s at johnaugust.com. Just follow through to the links there. Or if you’re listening to this on most of the players swipe and you will see a list of links there. Come see us at our live show tomorrow night if there are still tickets. But also January 27th is our big show for William Goldman’s The Princess Bride. Looking forward to that. You can find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you subscribe to podcasts. While you’re there, leave us a review. Those are lovely. We need to read some of those reviews aloud so we’ll try to remember to do that. Transcripts go up within the week and so you can find transcripts for all the episodes back to the first episode. You can find the audio for all our episodes at Scriptnotes.net. It is $2 a month for all of those back episodes and bonus episodes, too. Craig: So cheap. John: So cheap. Craig: So cheap. John: Craig, I will see you tomorrow for the live show. Craig: See you tomorrow for the live show, John. John: Bye. Links: Tickets are on sale for the Holiday Live Show! The Team America: World Police puke scene, with some bad language The opening of Finding Nemo Aslan’s sacrifice in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe Can We Stop Suicides? by Moises Velasquez-Manoff for the New York Times The environment in Red Dead Redemption 2 T-shirts are available here! We’ve got new designs, including Colored Revisions and Highland. John August on Twitter Craig Mazin on Twitter John on Instagram Find past episodes Scriptnotes Digital Seasons are also now available! Outro by Michael O’Konis (send us yours!) Email us at [email protected] post Scriptnotes, Ep 378: The Worst of the Worst — Transcript first appeared on John August.