Archives for 2019

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/mushroom-powder).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** Yes, my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 414 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast it’s How Would This Be a Movie with four terrific stories in the news that maybe, just maybe, could become feature films. Plus we’ll be answering some listener questions about narrators, personal crises, and song titles.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** And Craig I thought we would do the questions up front because I always feel like we push the questions to the end and we may rush a bit. So we’re going to lead with the questions with the questions this week.

**Craig:** Yeah. We can really milk the answers. I love it.

**John:** That’s what we’ll do. But, I have news and a favor to ask of all our listenership. So, I’ll post a link here in the show notes, but I am trying to direct a feature film. I think I said this on the podcast before. Part of the reason why I’m not running for the WGA board again is I’m hoping to direct a feature film in these next two years. That film is called The Shadows. The central character in it is Abby. She is 15 years old. She’s smart, resourceful, anxious, and blind. That means I need to find a blind actress who is 15 years old-ish to play this role.

That’s not going to be easy. There’s not just a list of teenage blind actors who are ready to make feature films. So, if you follow through the link you’ll see I have a casting notice up that describes what I’m looking for. It has audition scenes. My hope is that we’re going to find someone who has probably never had the opportunity to act in a feature film before or television who will self-tape and present herself as the possible actress for this role.

But if I cannot find this actress I cannot make a movie. So, if you know an Abby or you think you might know an Abby the place to check out the information is johnaugust.com/casting. That’s where you go to see all the information and the audition scenes and stuff about self-taping of yourself to possibly be cast in this movie.

**Craig:** Good URL. Appropriate. So traditionally the way this would work is casting directors would be sent out into the world and they would cast a wide net and show up in malls and things, trying to just pluck out some diamond from the rough. But now we have these things. We have podcasts and Twitter and social media. So this is a great way to get the word out that you’re looking for somebody like this and I have to presume that there are tons of kids across the United States who are acting, or acting in school productions, or community theater who are blind who will hear this and say, yeah, what about me, John August.

**John:** Yeah, what about you?

**Craig:** What about me?

**John:** So classically the casting director would send out this notice and you might do searches in malls and such, but that’s not going to work for this very specific part. So ultimately there will be a casting director to help do all the other things, but if I cannot find this person it is sort of pointless to do anything more about trying to make this movie. So, this is not the first step. The first step was writing the script. But the second step is trying to find this actress, so that’s what I’m trying to do right now.

Ryan Knighton who was on the show once or twice, a fantastic writer, actually the reason why I met him was because I was writing this script. So that’s how long I’ve been working on this. This predates the Arlo Finch books. But now is the time where I can actually make this movie. So, if you can help me find this actress I’d be much obliged.

**Craig:** Now, here’s a question for you. Let’s say you don’t. Do you scrap the movie?

**John:** We scrap the movie.

**Craig:** You scrap the movie.

**John:** I don’t think you can make the movie kind of any other way. I’ll say that as I started writing this movie it was a real concern. Like is this an idea worth pursuing knowing how hard it will be to find the right person for this part. And I decided to go for it because it’s something I’d never seen before on screen and that’s really interesting to me. I want to make the movie I want to see most, and this is kind of the movie I want to see.

So, that’s why I wrote it and that’s why I’m hoping to be able to direct it.

**Craig:** Well, I think you will find someone. I can’t imagine that you won’t. That doesn’t seem possible. Sight is not required for acting talent. It’s just not. You know, I think of all the things that we do in our business and acting is so interestingly internal. In many ways I would imagine that there’s probably a lot of acting exercises where if you are sighted you close your eyes anyway and try and relate to somebody without the extra cues. So, I would be shocked if you don’t find not just one person but a lot of people. I think you will.

**John:** I hope so, too. And I do think it will be a process of working with this person to figure out a language for how we’re going to do the things we need to do and how to sort of best make this movie happen. If this were a supporting character we might not have the time and resources to make this all possible, but this is the central character and so it’s all going to be about figuring out the best way to make this movie. So, it’s going to be a very collaborative process.

**Craig:** No question. I mean, I’m just thinking ahead to the day you’re there and you’re shooting. I mean, other than figuring out how to assist the actor with hitting a mark. By the way, people probably don’t even know – a lot of people don’t know why this whole thing of the actor has to hit their mark even exists. It’s because film cameras and even the video cameras that we use now like the Alexa and so on and so forth, they don’t have automatic focus the way your iPhone does or an old school video camera because those auto focuses are actually very slow. I mean, you’ve probably noticed that when you’re shooting things that sometimes they’re blurry and then they get – well you’re not allowed to have any blurry ever when you’re making a movie.

So there is a focus puller whose job is to constantly adjust focus depending on how far away from the lens the actor who is being filmed is. So they measure where they are and if there’s a scene where they’re moving then during rehearsal we’ll watch them and then there is an assistant camera person, the camera assistant, who watches them and where they stop that person comes over and puts a little piece of tape down or a little bean bag. And the actor now has to reliably stop there each time because that’s a distance that the focus puller is relying on.

So I could see where if somebody was not sighted you would need to have a little extra assistance there to make sure that they didn’t fall short or go too far depending on their motion. But beyond that I think it’s probably the same as everything else, right?

**John:** Yes. So focus is one small issue. I’m sure they’ll be other things that come up. But I’m mostly just excited to meet this actor and see what she can bring to the part.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Now, Craig, you actually had an unexpected bonus episode of the Chernobyl podcast that just came out today as we’re recording this. Tell us about this episode. And I especially liked your little prologue to it.

**Craig:** Oh, thank you. Surprise episode. So this is my Lemonade. It’s a surprise. Well, we were talking and so the podcast was surprisingly popular. We didn’t necessarily imagine that Chernobyl itself was going to be quite as viewed as it was. And I really didn’t think that the podcast would be quite as listened to as it was. But it was. And that’s very gratifying. And Jared and I were talking and he suggested kind of a little bit of a bonus, OK now that the show has come and aired and has been viewed and occupied a space could we/should we discuss it.

And so we got Peter Sagal back and Jared joined us. And I think maybe a day after or two days after we recorded it all of a sudden there was this news story and, huh, a nuclear explosion in Russia that they weren’t telling us about. Well that’s familiar. So I did a quickie solo prologue and, yes, that is available this morning. So if you subscribed to the Chernobyl podcast you got a little ding on your phone this morning. But if you don’t it’s available on all podcast platforms in the known universe, including YouTube and Stitcher and all the other ones that John knows I don’t know.

**John:** And we’ll also put a link to it in the show notes so people can follow through there. Because sometimes people are meticulous and they delete subscriptions just so they don’t have old things sitting around.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So you can follow through there. One final bit of news. There’s been an issue with the app, the Scriptnotes app for the premium listeners. Folks both on the Android side and on the iOS side have written in with some problems. So, if you are having problems with the app the general advice I can give you is make sure you’re using the most recent version of it. If you’re still having a problem write into the ask@johnaugust.com account and Megana can help steer you towards some resources or at least get reported to the actual folks who manufacture those apps to make sure that we get those bugs fixed. Sorry for anybody who is having problems.

**Craig:** Was the bug that somehow some of the money was going to me?

**John:** No. It was not a money flow issue. It was simply an authorization token.

**Craig:** So that bug remains is what you’re saying? The bug of money not going to me.

**John:** That bug – that is a feature not a bug.

**Craig:** [laughs] I am a feature not a bug.

**John:** You are a feature not a bug. Some follow up. Why writes in, “As a longtime fan of the show I believe you guys have made me a better writer. But that sadly cannot be empirically proven. My body weight however is easy to accurately measure. A few months ago I listened back to Episode 50, How to not be Fat. And John’s diet, slow carb, sounded really simple and easy. Having never attempted a diet before I went in with no expectations but the change was instantaneous. Now some four months later I’ve already lost over 30 pounds. So this is a thank you for helping me to not be fat at the very least.”

Craig, can you even remember back to Episode 50?

**Craig:** No, I thought we started at Episode 51. I don’t know if we even did this. What are these first episodes? They might be other guys.

**John:** I think this was like a random advice episode. I think this was maybe not a traditional craft and character arcs. But we did talk about it. I remember discussing it and back at that time I was doing this slow carb diet which is like the Atkins diet. It’s like all these things where essentially you eat fats and proteins and not a lot of carbohydrates. And it works. And at that point I was eating a lot of black beans and eggs. And you will lose weight if you do that.

I’m not doing that right now, but I’m sort of mindful of those things and I try not to eat a lot of carbs that I don’t need to eat. So, if you want to go back and do that, great. But we’re not really a good diet and health advice podcast.

**Craig:** No. Not at all. There are four billion of those. Listen to one of those waste of times. Because we would like to waste your time in different ways.

**John:** Yeah. But Why I’m happy for you that you‘ve lost this weight. I would encourage you to find other ways other than just a diet to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Because just eating alone is not enough.

**Craig:** Yes. Meth is not recommended. You will lose a lot of weight. A lot of weight with meth.

**John:** A tremendous amount. Because teeth – teeth are heavy, too.

**Craig:** Just the teeth alone.

**John:** Those last ounces, just pop them out one by one.

**Craig:** Yeah, man.

**John:** Tic-Tacs.

**Craig:** Meth. I mean, who doesn’t know not to do meth still?

**John:** My hunch is that some people who do meth – this is me talking with absolutely no expertise.

**Craig:** I like this. Go for it.

**John:** My hunch is that people who find themselves doing meth often don’t know they’re doing meth when they start doing meth or they’re coming from some other drug and when that drug is no longer available that’s how they’re ending up at meth. That’s just a guess. I’ve done no research or Googling before saying that.

**Craig:** Your theory is that no one is really sitting down and going, right, so I don’t have drug problems and I’m aware that this is meth. Let’s go. You’re saying that’s probably not happening.

**John:** I think that’s probably not the default pathway into meth abuse.

**Craig:** Well, meth. How about some questions. Should I start with Alison from Atlanta?

**John:** Go for it.

**Craig:** Alison from Atlanta asks, “I’m in the planning phases of my screenplay and I’ve come to fork in the road about whether or not to use a narrator. I’ve heard the argument that it’s lazy writing as you’re telling instead of showing, which I understand, but some of my favorite movies or TV shows use narration really successfully. I feel like it could be especially useful when there is significant dissonance with how a character feels inside versus how they are behaving. Do you have any advice for when the narration is useful or when it detracts from the story?”

John, what’s your advice for Alison?

**John:** The only project I’ve had that I think has a narrator – I take that back. Two projects I’ve used narrators for. The first is Big Fish. The second is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. In both cases they were really, really helpful. But let’s take a look at why. In Big Fish that narrator is sort of the voice of Edward Bloom, the storyteller who is bridging between the real world and the fantasy world. It starts kind of in the real world and drifts into the fantasy world. Helpful for that. Could you do the movie without the narrator? Yes. But it is useful.

Second movie is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory which is very much a fairy tale, a storybook telling of this boy’s quest and Willy Wonka. In those cases, useful.

Those are situations where I think the narrator is helpful. Unfortunately we encounter so many movies and scripts where voiceover or narration has been applied in post. It was not part of the initial conception of the storytelling. And, wow, you can tell.

**Craig:** Yeah. Narration sometimes is a Band-Aid. But I want to say, Alison, when you say some of my favorite movies or TV shows use narration really successfully, that’s the answer to your question. Anybody who makes the argument that narration is inherently lazy writing, as you “telling instead of showing” is wrong. And you should tell them to their faces that they’re wrong. And that probably everything else that they say after that should be considered invalid. Because it’s the most ridiculous thing to say. Narration is a perfectly good tool if it’s used properly.

Like you, John, I have not written a lot of things that have narration in them, but I remember the first thing I wrote with narration was a movie based on a Philip Dick short story. This is many, many years ago. And it’s one of my favorite things that I’ve written, so of course it didn’t get made. But the hero was an immigrant who did not speak English. He was an Italian immigrant. He didn’t speak English. And the story itself had a kind of romantic fairy tale quality to it so a narrator felt appropriate. He was able to kind of fill in some things when the character was alone and wouldn’t necessarily be speaking in his own language. And if he did why would we subtitle. There’s a lot of weirdness in there. But it was mostly the fairy tale-ness of it that seemed to call for a narrator.

Similarly when you talk about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, it is kind of a modern fairy tale. It is clearly taking place in a world that is a pushed version of our own. So the storybook aspect of it feels worth honoring and acknowledging. So, go for it Alison. If it feels right then do it. And if you’re doing it because it’s just convenient, or solving some problems, maybe not.

**John:** I would encourage people to think about the movie Clueless without Cher’s narration. It would be unwatchable. You would not like Cher in that movie if you did not have the ability to see inside of her head. And that’s really what it is. It’s honestly kind of like giving that protagonist a song in a musical. It’s allowing you to expose what they’re not saying to everybody else in the scene. So that may be another situation where you need to use it.

**Craig:** Correct. And if you think about Fleabag which is spectacular, all of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s little discourse to camera to us, that’s narration. That’s what that is. The fact that she’s filmed doing it but talking to us doesn’t change the fact that it’s narration. And we don’t mind it, we love it. Because it fits. It makes sense.

Goodfellas needs narration. Narration – probably the same exercise worth doing. Watch Goodfellas and every time the narration starts hit mute. It just won’t work. Or it won’t work as well.

**John:** All right. Nicole asks, “I live in one of the cities that was recently devastated by a mass shooting. As I’m sure you can imagine you the depth and breadth of emotion in the aftermath is sometimes overwhelming. I have an appointment with my therapist and we’ll work through it with her, but in the meantime I’ve got a draft due to a producer I’ve never worked with before. Normally I’m super responsible about hitting deadlines, but it’s really hard to get my head into writing comedy right now so I’m struggling to get pages out and I am falling behind. How do you overcome your personal life crises when you have to get your work done? Should I let the producer know that the draft might be delayed or wait and see if I can get back on track soon? The draft is due in about two weeks.”

Craig, what advice would you have for Nicole?

**Craig:** Well, first of all fantastic question. And I’ve been there. Happily I haven’t been there a lot. But when it happens it happens. And I think Nicole your sense that this is not mentally doable for you needs to be listened to and respected. Yeah, you could soldier through it but would it be good? And is it good for you?

When this has happened to me, when there have been incidents in my own life – I just went through one myself again with my family – where either someone is ill or there is a crisis or trauma that befalls you or around you or you just on your own without any cause slip into a clinical depression or an unmanageable state of anxiety it is absolutely fair to call people up and say I need two weeks, because I need two weeks. This is where I am. This the page I’m on. This is why I need the two weeks, without getting into super-duper detail. I will be back after those two weeks and then I will finish.

There are not many things that will work as well as a break. And what you don’t want to do is turn your work, your writing, the thing that you love and that you rely on into a burden or more fuel for dysfunction and misery. John, what do you think?

**John:** Your advice is absolutely correct. And what I would caution Nicole to do is not to wait until the actual due date to lob in that email or that phone call, because then it just looks like, oh, you just ran out of time and now you’re telling us.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, this is the time to reach out to that producer, even if it is a person you’ve not worked with before, and explain the situation. In this case you have – I don’t want to say the advantage – but because it’s a public event that everyone can see it’s pretty clear that there’s a basis behind this. That you’re not just making an excuse.

It can be tougher when it’s just your own thing. When it’s something in your own family that you don’t want to discuss. When it’s clinical depression coming up. When you’re having problems that can’t be sort of externally verified I know it’s scarier to reach out and make that call, but you got to reach out and make that call. And you need to do it before the time is up.

If you have an agent, manager, lawyer, someone else who is also on your side, a different producer if it’s about the studio, it’s worth clueing them in to just so that they have a sense of what you’re going through so that they can back you up a bit.

**Craig:** And you are working in a business that’s full of people that have all sorts of emotional issues and mental health issues. And after all you’re also working in a business that pedals emotion. That is our product. So the fact that you are a feeling person, that you have a sensitivity – that isn’t a bug, that’s a feature right?

You don’t have that thing that actors have where they can use their crisis to pump out tears on film or if they’re having a terrible, tragic day it theoretically could be turned to their advantage. Writing requires a lot of mental energy. It requires focus and attention. It’s spinning 12 plates at once. There’s a lot of logic going on. And then also all of that emotion. I think in general you will be met well by people. They will not say to you, “No, I want you to finish it anyway. You can’t take two weeks off.” Because at that point they’re kind of shooting themselves in the foot. What are they going to do, complain to you then when they get the script and don’t like it? You told them. You warned them.

Also, there’s really nothing they can do about it. You can just get sick for two weeks. If you feel, by the way, this is for anyone, that you’re working for people who truly will not get it, then lie. If somebody is so miserable as to not understand the validity of an emotional crisis then just tell them or having your agent or representative or manager tell them that you have a physical illness that is going to last two weeks. Because they can’t argue with that.

It’s a shame that sometimes you have to do that. But if somebody is going to be a total jerk about it then they forfeit their right for you to be completely honest and forthcoming.

**John:** I think that’s all true. The last thing I want to say is that just making that phone call or that email and telling them that this thing could come in late in my own experience has relieved so much anxiety on my side about the fact that I’m worried that I’m going to be late that it made the writing a lot easier. So some of what you’re actually feeling is the panic over a what if I can’t actually deliver this on time. And so by tipping them off that you may not be able to deliver this on time you’ve lowered the stress on yourself and you may actually be able to do the work that you need to do and be happy about the draft you’re turning in.

**Craig:** No question. Sometimes you say I need two weeks and they say sure. And then two days later you’re like I’m good. What you really needed was two days. And that’s the thing. You’re right. The worst feeling for writers is feeling that they have to write and yet they can’t do their best work. That’s a terrible feeling.

So, whatever you need to do to not have that feeling, do it.

**John:** Do it.

**Craig:** OK. So we’ve got one more question. This is from Seth who asks, “My question is about using a song as the basis for a movie. For example, if I decide to write a quirky rom-com about a grungy mechanic from the Lower East Side who meets a beautiful society girl from Central Park West and I call it Uptown Girl, do I owe Billy Joel a credit or money? I know that if the song is licensed that will cost. But what about the concept?” Well that’s an interesting question. Hmm, John, any thoughts on that one? We’ll be pretend lawyers for the moment.

**John:** We’ll be pretend lawyers. I think you’re in real jeopardy if you call that movie Uptown Girl. Uptown Girl is a title that everybody knows. It’s very clear that it’s inspired by that song. No, Seth, no. Don’t do it.

So, if a song inspires you, so if you wanted to do a movie about a mechanic and a society girl, you could do that probably pretty safely because it’s going to be generic enough that like there’s nothing in the song that you’re actually taking from that. But you call that movie Uptown Girl and you just put a giant crosshair on your back.

Honestly, if your movie has nothing to do with the song but you call it Uptown Girl you’re probably going to be getting some heated emails from some people who are not too happy about that. I don’t think that’s a safe choice. Craig, what do you think?

**Craig:** Yeah, I agree with you. I’m not sure where the legal line is per se, but you actually don’t want to find out. They’re going to make a problem for you. The point is that usually speaking the stories of songs in and of themselves aren’t really copyright – I mean, they’re copyrightable. Of course, lyrics are copyrighted. But the story inherent to those can be duplicated without fear of infringement.

For instance, I’m thinking of a good old story song like the Pina Colada song. Escape (The Pina Colada Song). So most people know the story of that ridiculous song. A guy gets tired of his marriage to his wife, so he is looking for singles ads, or I guess he writes a singles ad. Yeah, that’s what he does. He puts an ad looking for somebody who likes the following things, including Pina Coladas in the rain, and then somebody responds back and says, “I love all those things. Let’s meet.” And so he goes to a bar to meet up with this new woman that he’s going to cheat on his wife with and lo and behold it’s his wife. And then they laugh weirdly, which would not actually happen. In real life it would be a rocket ship to divorce.

But regardless, because it’s just bizarre, but the story of somebody looking to cheat on his wife and swiping right and ending up with his wife, anybody could do that. That idea is not intellectual property. If you call it The Pina Colada movie and he’s talking about Pina Coladas in the rain then oh yeah you’ve got a problem.

So I agree with you. I don’t see the point. I don’t really think the title Uptown Girl is so important to that concept anyway. If it’s the only attractive thing about that idea, well then you kind of are leaning on the Billy Joel-ness of it all and I would think he’d have a reasonable argument to make.

**John:** So titles we talked about before are – the whole process of getting titles cleared is complicated and there’s a whole division that sort of approves which movies can have which title. But it is complicated by songs. And I’ve been through several situations on movies and other projects where a title we would have wanted is a famous song. It becomes arguable like are we using it in reference to that song or not. It becomes complicated. Don’t call your movie Uptown Girl unless you’re making a Billy Joel related movie I would say.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Agreed. All right. Let’s talk about movies we do want to make. This is a segment we do every once in a while called How Would This Be a Movie where people send us stories that are in the news and we talk about them the only way we know how to talk about them is how do we turn these into narrative feature films or perhaps TV series. This time we have four of them because there were four really good ones and I just couldn’t winnow it down.

Different people sent in different things. I’m not going to credit who sent stuff through because in some cases it was multiple people. But they’re all compelling in different ways.

So let’s start with a podcast I listened to this past week. It is by Willa Paskin for Slate’s Decoder Ring podcast. She is a terrific writer and these are really well-produced episodes. I really loved listening to the whole podcast series. The one this week was about the soft serve wars. So the Mr. Frosty trucks both in Midtown, Manhattan but also in China and sort of the war of turf, of different companies competing, and break off groups, and the history of soft serve ice cream. I thought there was a lot of compelling stuff here. Craig, how did you feel about this as story material?

**Craig:** Well, it’s an interesting world. And it occurred to me you probably didn’t have this, right? I mean, where you were growing up in Colorado?

**John:** No, we didn’t have soft serve trucks.

**Craig:** Yeah. We had them everywhere. So on Staten Island, and this extends throughout New York in every part of New York, you would have these trucks. And there were two trucks that would come by. One was the Good Humor man. So he had the Good Humor brand of ice cream.

**John:** And Good Humor was hard ice cream?

**Craig:** It was. It was incredibly hard. It was the hardest of ice creams. It was so hard. And then there was the Mister Softee truck who would come by, and that was the soft serve. And frankly I did prefer the Mister Softee. It just didn’t come by as often. And they would play their songs. They had their little jingles. And we would get very excited and run after the truck.

So, right off the bat I think one of the issues with this is that it’s not necessarily a universal experience. The notion of this kind of turf war over this particular kind of product. It does feel a little niche to me. Obviously when people are trying to do it China studios get very excited when something may appeal to a Chinese audience, because they’re greedy. But I’m a little concerned about that.

The story though that this brought to mind, when you were a kid, John, did you ever read a book called The Push Cart War?

**John:** Called The Push Cart War. Yes!

**Craig:** Do you remember that one?

**John:** We said it at the same time. I do absolutely. And they had little pea shooters and they were shooting out the truck tires I believe.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I do remember The Push Cart War. We’ll put a link to that in the show notes. It reminded me a lot of that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, The Push Cart War is basically a classic story of the little guy versus the big guy. And the little vendors versus the big trucks. And in this case I could certainly see a kind of comedy – I think it would have to be a comedy – of competing ice cream vendors who are at each other’s throats scrapping over the last nickel and dime. And then they have to face a common enemy which is, I don’t know, suddenly a Starbucks or some massive corporation is taking over by sending their new things in which is better and bigger supposedly. So it becomes mom and pop, little guy versus the big guy, and maybe there’s a little bit of an allegory of the way that capitalism gets people on the lower rungs to beat each other up and leave a space for the big guy to just waltz in.

But I’m not sure – I’m a little worried about the whole ice cream aspect of it because I just don’t know if people in like you say Boulder or Denver are going to say, oh yeah, ice cream trucks. I think they might go, “Ice cream trucks?” That’s a problem.

**John:** Well let’s talk about that universality. Because even in the intro here I said Mr. Frosty rather than Mister Softee because I didn’t know that as a thing.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** That’s how little I knew about that. But I don’t know that this lack of universality really is necessarily a problem because I think, you know, I could imagine the start of this story very quickly setting up important it is for this community and really establishing the worlds. Because so many movies we see, like I don’t know anything about sort of how baseball mathematics works, but the movie is going to teach me how to care about that.

You know, there’s so many movies involve characters who are experts in things I don’t know anything about and that’s part of the experience of watching the movie. So I’m not so worried about the lack of universality in the sense of like places that don’t have ice cream trucks as long as I can establish why it’s important for these people who are selling ice cream and these people who are buying ice cream.

There were three kind of main threads and I think you’d have to pick one of them to make a movie. There’s the guys who are trying to start a Mister Softee business in China. And so that’s – you can picture that one. You’re trying to build something within a bureaucracy which is really complicated and you’re trying to explain to people what it is that you’re doing.

It was fascinating in the podcast talking about how McDonalds and I think KFC were the only places that were serving soft serve at that point and they had separate walk up drive-thru windows for just soft serve ice cream because it was so new and unusual there at the time they were launching. So China is one possibility and the rise and fall of that company.

Then the tension between the Mister Softee trucks and the competing brands within Midtown Manhattan. It’s probably a comedy. It’s probably like Adam Sandler is the godfather. Sort of a turf war kind of thing and it seems silly but these people are taking it really seriously. That section of the movie, I don’t know about you, but I got sort of PTSD trying to think about the logistics of shooting in Midtown Manhattan and how you’re getting all these trucks in Midtown Manhattan. The filming of it freaked me out.

**Craig:** By shooting in Toronto, of course. [laughs]

**John:** That’s naturally how you would do it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But they’ll get the New York City tax credit. And finally the single character who is probably the most compelling and interesting is a woman they interview. She’s the ice cream woman who took over her dad’s route. He was a Good Humor man who then had a soft serve truck. And so she’s the – actually she doesn’t have a soft serve truck. She’s still selling traditional ice cream in Brooklyn.

She had a fantastic voice. She just felt like a really compelling character. For a single protagonist this woman trying to defend her father’s route feels like a through line. But I don’t know if any of these are compelling enough movies that I’m rushing out on a Friday night to see them.

**Craig:** No. I think it would require – I think you probably got closest with the idea of Sandler. Of a comedic star taking something that’s small like the Water Boy and making it into something epic. I mean, Tim Herlihy is a genius at doing stuff like that and I could easily see Tim writing a really funny movie that’s centered around Mister Softee versus Good Humor, which is just already I’m kind of giggling at it. It sounds like a funny idea.

So that’s probably the closest I would think to actually getting it made. I mean, this other last little component of this is that there is – for those of us who grew up in New York – there’s a lot of nostalgia to it. There’s a strange kind of connection to the past with those trucks when I see them walking around, even as an adult, and I would see the Mister Softee. The logo is like a cone that’s got soft serve but he’s got a face like in the cone. And just his face warms my heart. It just does. His dumb, stupid cone face makes me happy.

**John:** Yeah. I also got thinking about sort of what’s the color scheme, what’s the world, like what’s happening in the day. It got me thinking back to Do the Right Thing which is an incredibly hot day and sort of what it feels like to have an ice cream truck on that hot day and sort of like passing through these neighborhoods. What would it feel like and what does it feel like to be the guy on the truck? And it’s a cash business and so you’re always vulnerable that way. The staking out of corners. Even if it’s not done as heavy drama, it felt like there were dramatic moments in there. There were reversals. That felt interesting and I think doing it – probably knocking it back a few years and setting it period is helpful for that way, just because you get the benefit of nostalgia and a simpler time when we didn’t have Uber and Postmates and all the other things that got you your ice cream. You might be waiting for that truck to come.

**Craig:** All right. So we’ve decided. This is going to be set in the ‘70s or ‘80s. Tim Herlihy is writing it. Sandler is in it. It feels like it’s going to Netflix. Sandler has got that huge deal at Netflix. I’m in. I’m watching that movie. What do we get for – do we get money for this? Do you we get money when they? Yeah, you know what? They’ll have to send us money. Yeah. Money.

**John:** Yeah. We’ve made a lot off this.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** All right. So our next story is about Zimbabwe’s female rangers. It’s a story in the National Geographic by Lindsay M. Smith, photos by Brent Stirton. So this talks about an all-female wildlife ranger team, the Akashinga. And so they are the defenders of the animals within this region. It’s a non-profit international anti-poaching foundation. The Phundundu Wildlife Area is 115-square-mile former trophy hunting tract in the Zambezi Valley ecosystem.

We’ll summarize some stuff in here, but it’s worth clicking through for the photos because I thought the photos were actually one of the most fascinating parts of this. Craig, what did you take from the female ranger’s article?

**Craig:** Well, I thought that this was a chance to do something more than what it was. I actually – the value here to me is that it can be allegorical. And I do like these stories where it seems like, OK, this is pretty straight up. It’s about women who are fighting off poachers to protect animals. That’s a very nice thing. Who cannot like that? That’s very sweet. But in and of itself there’s the problem. It feels a little just saccharine. Right? Like, ah, cool, women are doing that. And they’re beating poachers. And everyone hates poachers. And they’re saving animals. Hooray.

But I think there’s probably an interesting story to be told underneath where these characters who are doing this are in their own way reclaiming something about their lives that was taken from them. This is not easy. Living in Zimbabwe isn’t always easy. That country has been under the thumb of Robert Mugabe, a dictator and a thug, for decades. And that part of Africa is a tough area to live. And being a woman in any part of Africa seems like it’s an additional challenge.

And so there is a chance to tell the story where it’s not just well-minded women go, you know what, we’re defending these elephants, but rather it’s women who have lost a certain kind of power or have been traumatized or who have been marginalized finding a way to reclaim some power and defend something of great value. And ideally – ideally – have a really positive portrayal of Africa, because we don’t get it a lot. We get a lot of Blood Diamonds. We get a lot of Ghosts in the Darkness or whatever that movie was with the lions. We don’t get a lot of this. And I think that’s really – that’s what you’d hope for.

And they do hint at this in the article. They point out that a number of these women have suffered trauma. They either were orphaned by parents who died of AIDS. Or they were victims of sexual assault or domestic abuse or abandonment. And so I think that’s where I would kind of come at it. And I do think actually this could be pretty cool. I could see this being a movie.

**John:** I could see this being a movie, too. And I agree with you that focusing on the women is clearly the way to tell this story. You want to see why they are doing this and why they are better suited for this task than men would be. And so the article does talk some about that in the sense of when they’re trained to do this they just do a better job, because they’re better able to work with the community. They have these automatic weapons but they don’t turn to those automatic weapons as sort of the first way to get a problem solved. And they work well together as a community, so that is crucial. I think that’s really the center of the storytelling.

In this short story we meet Sgt. Vimbai Kumire. So she’s one of the main women we follow in this story. But Enterprise World also meet Damien Mander. So he’s described as a “tattoo-covered Australian and former special forces soldier who has trained game rangers in Zimbabwe for more than a decade.” And he’s one of those characters who seems kind of interesting and compelling at the start, and yet I kind of don’t want him in the movie. My concern is that no matter what you try to do with this character he’s going to feel like the white savior guy. And that’s the thing I want to see least in this movie is the outsider who tells people how to do something.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So in focusing on this I’d want to find a way to tell the story honesty but that focuses on the women themselves and feels like it’s them solving this issue and not some outsider telling them how to solve this issue.

**Craig:** An alternative way to approach that is to accept the truth of it and then use that to address the white savior-ness of it. Meaning in reality this guy I assume was very useful and he helped trained them. But he’s not the one out there doing it. He’s not the one putting himself on the line. He’s not the one who is going to stay. This isn’t his country. And pointing that out I think is reasonable.

There is a limitation to the value of those people. But there is also real value to them. And that’s interesting. I think even a relationship – and I wouldn’t have it be a romantic relationship in any way, shape, or form – but a relationship between one of the leaders or a leading character of the women and him which is a relationship of mistrust and concern specifically for that reason. Because remember Zimbabwe was not always Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe was Rhodesia not so long ago. And the idea of addressing certain aspects of colonialism and asking how do we move forward and how do we live or work together with this behind us is an interesting one.

So there’s an alternative point of view to embrace it and face it head on. But I agree the one thing you can’t do is this old school thing of white guy shows up, teaches black people how to be better Africans, and then leaves. That’s – we don’t do that no more.

**John:** That’s not going to work.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So I think what we’re both saying is neither of us want this guy to be protagonist or antagonist in the story. He can be a character in the story. He can serve a function, but he should not serve one of those primary functions because that is something we’ve seen a lot and it becomes – I just get the bad kind of goosebumps when I see that.

**Craig:** Bad bumps. Nobody wants bad bumps.

**John:** Nobody wants bad bumps.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Where does this movie go? Where do we see this kind of movie happening?

**Craig:** Well, this is a movie that if done at a certain level and a certain way could earn a theatrical release because it theoretically could be quite prestigious. I could see it being an award-y kind of movie depending on how it’s done. It could also just be a very down the middle obvious treatment of this material. With all of these movies it’s always more likely that they’re going to be done on a streaming platform because that’s the world we live in. There’s no superheroes in it. Nothing blows up.

But, there is still a space for independent film and even for major studios releasing independently made films that address issues like this, have really interesting casts. I think you can cast this really well. Now more than ever there are some awesome actors of African descent, both American and Caribbean and British. And, of course, African. So there’s a lot of really cool opportunities. I think it could actually be a theatrical movie, but it would need independent love I would think.

**John:** I think you’re right. I could see a Participant or sort of an outside financier being a key player in this to make it happen at a budget level where you can sort of get the production values you really want to see there.

I would say of all the movies we’ve done on a How Would This Be a Movie before it reminded me somewhat of the California firefighter story we read.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** About the female inmates who were California firefighters. In which you a have a setting and a world but you need to pick very specific characters within that story to follow. And we don’t have them quite yet. We have sort of a sense of placeholders for people who could be there, but we don’t have actual characters with journeys. And so any writer who is approaching this is going say like, OK, here is the backdrop, here’s the world. I need to create an entire story. I need to import a story into this or do the firsthand research to figure out what are the stories I can tell that actually have beginnings, middles, and ends and characters who go through transformations. Because we’re not seeing that in this story so far.

**Craig:** Yeah. And this may just be a matter of personal preference but I think I would rather see this movie than the firefighter movie, just because I find the subject matter more interesting and I get to see somewhere I don’t know and learn things I don’t know and be with people that I don’t know. And it’s not that I know those women, but I know California, I know brush fires, I know firefighters. A lot of this we have experience with it. It’s not foreign to us. And I’m attracted by things that are foreign because you learn more. I just do. I mean, it’s one of the reasons I wanted to do Chernobyl. It was not American. It seemed like an opportunity.

**John:** Here’s what’s also great about this story is that as you’re watching this you are aware that the danger to these women could come from any direction. So it could come from other humans in the world. It could come from animals. It could come from gunshots. It could come from poachers. There’s a lot of things that could happen and stand in the way or endanger any of the characters we care about in the story.

In the firefighter movie we’re afraid of the fire mostly.

**Craig:** Fire. Yeah.

**John:** And so we can see that coming. Where we can’t always see bullets coming. Or we can’t see that dangerous panther or tiger or anything else that’s potentially out there. So that’s an interesting difference with this movie. Our last How Would This Be a Movie comes from an advice column in The Cut as well. It’s the Ask Polly advice column written by Heather Havrilesky. This one is about a woman with severe mushroom allergies who becomes convinced that her in-laws are maybe trying to kill her. So it’s not just that they are insensitive to her food sensitivity. They seem to be finding ways to introduce mushrooms into things that have no business having mushrooms in them.

I loved the letter writer’s description, but I especially loved Heather’s response to how nuts this situation was. And she actually says that this feels like the pitch for a dark comedy on premium cable. And, yeah, it kind of does. It’s that idea of like are my in-laws trying to kill me. Maybe they are.

**Craig:** Yeah. Heather went ham, which I love. And she was right to do so. And the letter writer was so weirdly sweet about it and kind of underplayed the insanity of what’s going on here.

Now, look, we live in a world where people will say, “Look, I have this allergy to this thing,” and maybe there’s a little pushback kind of in the air, like a little silent pushback which is, ugh, everyone is allergic to something now. You can see people kind of groaning and rolling their eyes sometimes. Or if someone says, oh yeah, if you’re in a restaurant, “I want the surf and turf but instead of the lobster can I have this because lobster makes me slightly itchy.” You know, I understand there’s a certain kind of, I don’t know, self-indulgent griping you could do about people with allergies.

But the truth is that when somebody has a legitimately troublesome allergy it is life-threatening. It is terrible. As a parent it’s got to be absolutely nightmarish to be policing your own child and just every day wondering is this the day that somebody slips freaking mushrooms in. And the crazy part, the craziest thing, is when after it’s been made clear to her in-laws that she has been hospitalized over this and convulsed in an ambulance because of mushrooms they added mushroom powder to mashed potatoes at a holiday dinner.

What is mushroom powder? I’ve never even heard of mushroom powder. That’s literally poisoning. You are poisoning – you’re trying to poison her. And everybody knows it. And they say things like, you know, “Well, everyone except your wife likes mushrooms and we’re not changing what we eat for one person.” Oh my god. It’s not that she doesn’t like them. It’s that they’ll kill her. So, I think the deal is they want to kill this lady. They’re literally trying to kill her.

**John:** The fact that it seems like they want to kill her is what makes this so compelling. And I think it’s easy to feel sympathy for this woman and I find the husband character really fascinating. Like how much of a doormat is he that he’s not willing to stand up to his family for trying to kill his wife? That isn’t good. But it’s easy to imagine who that family is and how messed up that family must be and how tight that family must be to want to do this.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I mean, this woman is an outsider marrying into a thing. It feels kind of great.

Now, this allergy by itself is not a movie. So, I think it’s suggesting a jumping off point for a movie, but there would have to be a lot of other things and this mushroom allergy is just like one sign, like a really clear sign of not just the undermining but the dangerous dislike that they seem to have for her. And that, you know, I think what’s relatable is we all kind of imagine that our in-laws don’t really like us, but to have it taken to the extremes is I think what makes it a movie.

**Craig:** Mushroom powder. So, one thing that I always try and remind myself when I read these things is we’re getting one person’s version. Now, it may be that this woman who is writing this letter and who is describing how her in-laws are trying to kill her with mushrooms, she could be awful. She could be an awful person. I’m not saying she is. But there’s a world in which she’s just a racist, nasty, abusive human being. And everyone reasonably loathes her.

Even then you can’t put mushroom powder in the mashed potatoes. You can’t. You can’t. You can’t mushroom somebody. You’re not allowed to mushroom people. There’s other ways to deal with them. You can’t mushroom them to death. That’s just wrong.

Is this a movie? No. It’s not at all a movie to me. I don’t think of it as a movie. I don’t think of it as a series. I think it could be an episode of something that’s kind of interesting. It could be a B-plot that you find out that somebody you hate is allergic to something and somehow mushrooms get – I don’t know.

**John:** I don’t think it’s a movie by itself. But I think the notion of are my in-laws trying to kill me – I think that is enough of a comedy idea that you could build something around it. I think there’s a tremendous amount more story you need to do there, but I think the mushroom aspect of it as am I crazy could work.

And a movie like Game Night comes to mind, where it’s just like it is funny but there is a real darkness underneath it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you could do a movie where a woman marries a man and it’s one of those interesting paranoid things. And Game Night has a similar aspect to it even though it’s a comedy. There’s a certain paranoia to it. Where she discovers that her husband actually has been married three times before that she didn’t know about and all three of those women died. And so now she’s thinking – and we’re all thinking – oh, he’s a serial wife killer. But he’s not. He insists that he’s innocent and she keeps finding clues. And eventually the big twist is it’s not him. It’s his mom. She keeps killing his wives. That could be cool.

I mean, I’ve just given away the ending.

**John:** To me the pitch is more like right from the start you’re worried about the mother-in-law, but of course she’s talked down, well everyone sort of feels that way about their future mother-in-law. And there’s ups and downs, but when it becomes clear like, wait, something really nuts is happening then there has to be a further step there. There has to be something more than just like, you know, oh, she’s trying to kill me. There has to really go to sort of why they’re trying to kill her, or what it is about that.

So, figuring out what that is – figuring out what’s really behind the family – that’s probably the key to what makes this a movie versus an advice column.

**Craig:** I want you to know there is mushroom seasoning. And there’s some mushroom powder. It’s really rare. I mean it’s just not – it’s not really a thing. You’ve got to go way out of your way – way out of your way – to find like dried porcini mushroom powder or something. They’re trying to kill her.

**John:** They are trying to kill her.

**Craig:** Sorry, based on what I read. I am not accusing anyone of anything. But based on what I read it would seem–

**John:** We don’t know the real family’s name, so they can’t libel us.

**Craig:** Correct. It would SEEM that they are trying to kill her with mushrooms.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, of these four things we’ve talked through which do you think will become a movie and which are you most excited to see if it’s not the same answer?

**Craig:** The Zimbabwe female rangers.

**John:** I would agree with you. I would say that’s probably the most compelling story area. I can imagine some version of the comedy soft serve wars thing happening. That feels like the nostalgic space for that. But I’m probably most excited to see the Zimbabwe anti-poaching rangers.

**Craig:** If Tim Herlihy does agree to come onboard and do the soft serve thing, then that one. But only if.

**John:** Herlihy or bust.

**Craig:** Herlihy or bust. That’s my motto.

**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is Game to Grow. So it’s this Seattle-based company and they use specially designed D&D experiences, modules and rulebooks, to help kids with anxiety and/or spectrum disorders relate to each other better and work through skills that they can use in real life. It seems great. So I have not met these people, the Adams, but I’ll put links in the show notes to an article about them, what they do. Also a Kickstarter for a thing called Critical Core which are sort of the slimmed down rulebooks that they use to talk through what they’re doing. But you look through this Craig and you’ll obviously recognize so many D&D things you love, but you’ll also recognize some things that are developmentally useful.

So there’s this one to nine scale of developmental capacities which is so true and accurate to sort of how kids process things which is basically how to think critically, how to cooperate going through stuff, how to plan ahead. All the things that you and I do all the time when we play D&D, which I think I probably got a lot out of playing D&D as a teenager, which is so useful and transfers so well to real life decision-making.

So it just seems like a great program, so I’ll tip people towards this and it’s something I’d love to see replicated in other places.

**Craig:** This is brilliant. And I love that the age range is so wide. So they’re looking at kids from ages eight to 20. So, this would certainly be relevant for one of my kids. And, yeah, I’m going to look a little deeper into this. For sure. This looks great.

My One Cool Thing this week is the National Puzzler’s League, otherwise known as MPL. The National Puzzler’s League is, like one hand there’s a magazine, The Enigma, that comes out with lots of puzzles in it. And they also have a national convention. This is not for your casual puzzler. I’m just going to tell you.

So I have friend Dave Shucan who is a brilliant puzzler and puzzle constructor and solver and he goes to the convention and he’s kind enough to say, hey, take a look at this puzzle that I did there. And they are awesome. They are really layered. When I say really layered I mean I tried explaining one to Melissa last night and she stopped me after about 12 words and said, “Please no more. I don’t want to hear anymore.” [laughs]

It’s layers and layers and layers. They’re beautifully done. They’re beautifully constructed. So I’m going to be joining the National Puzzler’s League and the membership for a year is a big whopping $23. I think I can do that. Online-only membership is just $15. So, yeah, I’m totally into that.

So National Puzzler’s League. If you want you can check it out at puzzlers.org and we’ll have a link in the show notes.

**John:** Fantastic. That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Med Dyer. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today.

Short questions on Twitter are great. So I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the casting notice. So, again, if you think you might know an Abby, a blind actress who is around 15 years old, I’m looking for her. So you can go to johnaugust.com/casting to find out more information about that.

You can find transcripts there as well on the site.

You can find all the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net or download 50-episode seasons at store.johnaugust.com.

Craig, thank you for helping me figure out whether these things would be movies.

**Craig:** My pleasure, John. Let’s do it again.

**John:** Cool. Bye.

Links:

* [The Shadows Casting Call](https://johnaugust.com/casting) John is looking for a 15 year old blind actress for the lead role — please help by sharing this link with anyone who might be a good fit!
* [Bonus Episode, Chernobyl Podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bonus-episode-with-jared-harris/id1459712981?i=1000446954276)
* [Scriptnotes Ep 50, How to Not Be Fat](https://johnaugust.com/2012/how-to-not-be-fat)
* [Decoder Ring: Ice-Cream Truck Wars](https://slate.com/podcasts/decoder-ring/2019/08/decoder-ring-explores-the-world-of-ice-cream-trucks) by Willa Paskin
* [Akashinga Women Rangers Fight Poaching in Zimbabwe Phundundu Wildlife Area](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2019/06/akashinga-women-rangers-fight-poaching-in-zimbabwe-phundundu-wildlife-area/) by Lindsay M. Smith
* [My In-Laws Are Careless About My Deadly Food Allergy](https://www.thecut.com/amp/2019/08/ask-polly-my-in-laws-are-careless-about-my-food-allergy.html) by Heather Havrilesky
* [Game to Grow](https://www.cnet.com/news/game-to-grow-the-dungeons-dragons-game-rescuing-kids-from-their-social-anxieties/?__twitter_impression=true), support on [Kickstarter here](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gametogrow/critical-core/description)!
* [National Puzzler’s League](http://www.puzzlers.org/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Med Dyer ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_414_mushroom_powder.mp3)

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/ready-to-write).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 413 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’re going to try to answer the question how do you know when you’re ready to write that script. Then we’re going to answer listener questions about rewrites and polishes and whether writing a bad script could put you on a do not hire list.

**Craig:** Do not hire.

**John:** Do not hire!

**Craig:** Do not!

**John:** But Craig, most crucially in follow up, a question a lot of people have been asking – Craig, what’s up? Are you OK?

**Craig:** I’m OK. So the last podcast was the one that you did with – and I was supposed to be there but I couldn’t, essentially connected to this same thing – you did the mental health podcast which we’ll get to in a bit. But prior to that I had to drop out of the race, the Vice Presidential race, the sexiest of all political races, vice president, because of a medical issue in my family.

So, a little context. First of all, no one is dying. I think that’s important for people to know. But I do have a kid who has multiple chronic health issues and there was – I think maybe, ugh, I want to say literally the day after I said, OK, I’ll go ahead and run for vice president we got a call that he had to go into emergency surgery for the second time in a year. And it’s a complicated surgery. It’s not the kind where they poke three holes in you. It’s more like the kind where they make a big line and go Wee. So, good news is he’s recuperating quite nicely, but he does have medical issues that we have to be attentive to. And it seemed to me not only that I was not going to be able to have the time or attention to give to the race, but even worse my ability to serve effectively for two years should I win was fairly compromised because, you know, if this happens again, or if one of his other conditions sort of acts up and that requires attention, then I just won’t be present or able to do the gig.

So, for that reason I had to drop out. But, you know, good news – to be clear – no one is dying. But, you know, it hasn’t been a great month.

**John:** Yeah. Life is challenging at times. And you and I both had some challenges as things happen. So, we’re glad to hear that he’s doing better and that you’re doing OK.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes I am. And I really appreciate. There was a wonderful outpouring of support and people were very lovely, which was nice to see. And we should. We should try and be lovely to each there is a medical crisis going on in a family, but nonetheless it was nice to see and encouraging that, you know, we all know ultimately what matters in life. There’s layers of importance and rankings of importance. And this is one of those things that’s more important.

So, we’re in a pretty decent place, but I think it was the right call to make.

**John:** I agree. Now, you also had a very bright moment of news over these last two weeks. You won a TCA, a Television Critics Association award for Chernobyl.

**Craig:** I won. I keep wanting to give it a name, like the Taco or something like that. The Taca? And I wasn’t able to go to the event and here’s why: because I had to then go to – I’ve been doing a lot of back and forth traveling – my son is at school in Utah, so we were going back and forth over the last few weeks from here to Salt Lake City. And then we had to go from here to Upstate New York to get my daughter from camp. She goes to a performing arts camp. And part of that final weekend when you collect your kid is that’s the big show. And if there’s one thing that movies have taught us, John, is that not seeing your kid in a production makes you a bad parent.

**John:** Oh absolutely. I mean, if there’s a third act lesson there, actually it’s often a first act indication that this is a terrible parent. But then by showing up at the third act moment you’ve redeemed yourself as a parent. So in the magical father wish comedy that is our life you showed up.

**Craig:** Right. I mean, the problem was I knew that there wasn’t going to be a show soon after that one, so I could have just first-acted that one and then arrived for the next one. Like, look, daddy gets it. But, no, I chose to do the right thing and go to see my child perform and it was great. So Jared Harris was able to accept on our behalf.

**John:** Oh nice.

**Craig:** And so it was great. I mean, I’ve never won an award before, I mean, in Hollywood. I’ve won things like in grade school.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Won some Mathlete challenges and such. But, no, it’s lovely. It’s a nice crystal slab and I’m very appreciative. So thank you Television Critics Association. That was super nice. And, you know, either I’m getting killed by critics or they’re giving me lovely crystal slabs. I’m confused. But it was great and very honored to receive something like that. And, you know, hooray.

**John:** Hooray. One of the things you did miss out on was this mental health and addiction panel. So that was last week’s episode we aired it. It really was just a terrific night and I’m so happy that people who have been writing in – it seems like it was meaningful for them as well. So, we talked about what it’s like to write characters with mental health problems or addiction issues, but also what writers should look for in their own lives when it comes to those two topics.

People wrote in with some really great personal stories, which we won’t share here, but it was clear that it touched a nerve for a lot of people. So if you haven’t listened to the episode yet I would recommend you go back and listen to that. Also listen to Episode 99. We will keep talking about these things in the future seasons of Scriptnotes because it’s not a problem that gets solved once.

**Craig:** It’s not. And it’s also not something that shouldn’t be talked about. We just naturally avoid it as people and we shouldn’t. We should be leaning into it. We should not feel any sense of shame. I feel no shame about my emotional issues and my mental difficulties and the medicine I take. And we do need to talk about it because our business, and particularly for writers I think the process of doing what we do as writers and then as writers for screen in particular is emotionally difficult and at times it can be extremely stressful.

And it is no surprise that a lot of writers end up with substance abuse problems. A lot of writers end up deeply depressed. A lot of writers end up with a kind of chronic anxiety that they find difficult to manage. And these are the things we want to avoid desperately, right. You can’t avoid them necessarily, but at least you can manage them and we can help each other by talking about them.

**John:** Yeah. The screenwriter classically is stressed out and isolated which is not a great combination for mental health.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** And so we need to look at ourselves and as an industry how do we do better for everyone who is facing those situations.

**Craig:** Precisely. And so, yes, we should keep talking about this and – and – John, I have an idea.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** You know so we do nice things for charities. Maybe there’s something we could do for a charity that is involved in this area.

**John:** That would be great. So, a charity that is focused on mental health. If there is a charity that is focused on writer mental health, even better. But we will find ways to do some sort of event that could be benefiting this. I will also say Hollywood Health and Society who organized this event, they’re great. They do a bunch of stuff. And so I hope this is the first of many of these kind of panels we do on different topics.

**Craig:** Yes. And I do hope that I’ll be able to be at the next one. I mean, weirdly enough part of why I wasn’t there was because of these chronic issues, one of which is a mental health issue. So it’s something that’s part of my family and it’s something that we deal with. And we are those people that aren’t embarrassed to talk about it.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** I guess that makes us special.

**John:** Aw. Another very special institution in Hollywood is Deadline. Deadline is the website that we all feel a little bit of shame every time we open because we know it’s bad for us and yet still sometimes we open it up.

**Craig:** I mean, sometimes it’s fine. You know, it’s not all bad. Although I still have like Nikki Finke like PTSD. Because it used to be like just her going bananas. And now, well, now they do things like what they just did to you.

**John:** So, we have complained on previous episodes where they’ll take stuff out of our transcripts and call it an exclusive. Like, oh wow, it’s an exclusive of a podcast that we just recorded and put out for free in the world. I put up a blog post this past week about the myth that the WGA is not negotiating. It was a 1,088 word post that really talked through pretty clearly my thoughts. Deadline thought it did a good job as well and so they took the entire post and wrapped it around in some double quotes at times with like, “August said.” Basically excerpting the whole thing but kind of making it seem like an article.

**Craig:** I mean, you can’t really excerpt it if you take all of it.

**John:** No. So I bitched on Twitter about that and I wrote to the writer, David Robb, saying I don’t think that was appropriate at all. I didn’t say copyright infringement, even though it’s clearly labeled as copyright. Because there’s such a thing as fair use and I want to make sure that fair use is protected and it’s such a crucial institution for dissemination of ideas and culture, especially in a journalistic context.

But to take an entire blog post written by another person and just put it on your site is not really journalism. And as a journalism major back in college if I had done this for a news story–

**Craig:** Oh good lord.

**John:** My professor would not have given me credit for that. It would have been a lecture.

**Craig:** They’re screwing with you now. I really feel like they’re kind of doing it on purpose. I actually had a conversation about this with Nellie Andreeva who works at Deadline. I was talking with her at one of these HBO media events. And she admitted that exclusive was not appropriate. And she said they actually had removed that when they saw it.

But I think that you’re making a really good point about the nature of reproduction. So fair use does say, listen, if there’s newsworthy value to it you can take some of it – some of it. Not all of it. Right? So if you’re taking all of it then I think you would need to do, for instance, so the New York Times or the Washington Post if they’re going to republish say a court document, which is not copyrighted by the way, they still put it kind of in its own little box. And they say, look, here’s the document. We’re not just going to quote the whole damn thing as if we dug it up ourselves and made editorial choices about what to include and what to not include.

I just think it is a violation of some basic principles of journalism and they shouldn’t do it. Also, how about this? Just put the link on there, quote a few things like a normal person would, and put the link on and say if you want to read the whole thing to.

**John:** Like Variety did. That’s what Variety did.

**Craig:** Yes. Like a normal – correct, because that’s normal.

**John:** They made a little summary and they linked out to the article. And so that’s kind of the minimum you could ask them to do. But here’s my probably bigger frustration is that the headline for it is something like John August Sees Long Slog Ahead for Agency Deal Negotiations. And “long slog” was in quotes. And I’m like I really don’t think I said that. So I took a look at my original post, I took a look at the actual post that they had put, and they added the word long and put it inside quotes as if I’d said long slog.

So when I complained specifically about that they took long outside of the quotes, so it was clearly just editorializing that it was going to be long.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s not right either.

**John:** That’s so wrong.

**Craig:** If you don’t call something a long slog they can’t quote you as saying long slog, nor can they describe it as a long “slog.”

**John:** Because you and I have both been through short slogs. That is a real thing where like, god, you’re grinding and you’re grinding and you’re grinding. It doesn’t mean it takes weeks. It means it’s just a really arduous process.

**Craig:** It’s tough. You can go through a slog of a negotiation for a project that they want to hire you for at a studio and it can be two miserable weeks of slogging. Where it’s back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. A long slog that’s months. That has a specific meaning. That’s not – I think they have failed twice in this regard.

**John:** So, and my frustration with this is that I got people who read – I tweeted out my link to my actual article on my blog and I got feedback from that. And then I got a whole different set of feedback for people who had seen the Deadline piece, not realizing there was a blog post, not realizing I had not said “long slog.” And I could tell they’d read the Deadline piece because it’s like you say it’s going to be a “long slog.” And I’m like, no I didn’t. I didn’t say that. Deadline did. And that’s the frustration, the degree to which it warps the conversation we’re trying to have.

**Craig:** Well, speaking of conversation, let’s have a conversation about what you wrote and your point of view, because I had a little bit of a different point of view on it, as I thought expressed by one of the great GIFs of all time. I thought I picked a great GIF.

**John:** I don’t know the source of that GIF. What is the source of that GIF?

**Craig:** I have no idea either. Nor can I even remember what words I typed into the search to get it. But it was so perfect because it was like – it wasn’t like bad it was just more like, hmm, I don’t know. It actually perfectly encapsulated my response. So, I wanted to kind of walk through it.

**John:** And I should say that my response GIF was Joey giving Chandler a hug from Friends.

**Craig:** So adorable. Nothing can keep us apart. I think it’s really important people understand this. Nothing.

**John:** Nothing.

**Craig:** Although that one person on Deadline does want you to fire me. Oh no, they were on Twitter. Sorry. They wanted you to fire me.

**John:** I don’t think you can really be fired Craig. I just don’t think it’s going to happen.

**Craig:** You can’t fire me. I quit!

**John:** I’m going to stop paying you, Craig!

**Craig:** Oh man. [laughs] So let’s talk through. So do you want to sort of encapsulate your position, or you want me to ask some questions basically?

**John:** Absolutely. Let me give the very short version. We’ll put a link to the actual blog post, not the Deadline post here. I started by saying that I think it’s incredibly important that we have robust discussion of ideas and issues but as a union it’s important to have a common set of facts. And I didn’t feel like we were having a common set of facts on this idea of no negotiation. And that this idea that we weren’t negotiating had become something of a straw man, where it was just presumed at the start and then you could argue against this idea. You know, the WGA says we shouldn’t negotiate. Well, we should negotiate. And so I cited three candidates who are saying we are refusing to negotiate and then I walked through what was actually said at the time that we said we were no longer going to be negotiating directly with the ATA but negotiating with individual agencies, and what had changed in the meantime. What actually happened in the meantime.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So that’s a very short summary of what I wrote.

**Craig:** Yeah. And your suggestion is essentially that the argument of the WGA refusing to negotiate is a bit of a straw man. And it is and it isn’t. So there is imprecise language there, no question. I guess we want to – my point of view is let’s talk about what is sort of the significant core of this complaint, even if the language is imprecise that the WGA refuses to negotiate.

The complaint is that the WGA refuses to negotiate in any effective way with the big four agencies that essentially, A, control the ATA, and B, represent the great majority of our membership. I don’t think there’s much of an argument there, is there?

**John:** I think there is an argument there. Here’s what I think is fair to say. That the WGA has said that instead of negotiating with the ATA that we wanted to negotiate with the agencies individually. Specifically in Goodman’s point he says, “The top nine agencies,” so the big four and the next five agencies. We want to focus on them. And so have individual discussions with those agencies.

So it is fair to say that we are choosing not to negotiate with the ATA, refusing – not negotiate with the ATA. And to the degree that you’re not negotiating with the big four because they are only agreeing to negotiate through the ATA. That’s not as well established. But it seems like their preference is to negotiate through the ATA.

**Craig:** Well, that’s where I’m not sure I agree on that. Part of the issue is you can say, listen, we don’t want to negotiate with the ATA anymore. We just want to negotiate with the individual agencies and that includes CAA and WME and UTA and ICM. But the problem is that when David Goodman makes that statement he is well aware – I think we’re all well aware – that because of the nature of the proceedings prior to that moment which is kind of nothing happening, they make a proposal, we do not respond in any way to that proposal. Then they come back. They unilaterally raise their proposal. And we say after some time we’re not negotiating with you anymore. That that was in effect a secession of negotiations. And that it was incredibly improbable that without some sort of significant change in something that the individual agencies would not then take David Goodman up on this invitation.

**John:** Can you wind back that last sentence? So you’re saying that it was improbable that any agency would agree to individually negotiate?

**Craig:** I’m talking about the big four.

**John:** OK.

**Craig:** And the reason I keep talking about the big four is while we have signed some other agencies, I think it’s important to say that – unless I’m wrong about this – I don’t think we’ve signed any agencies that actually were engaging in packaging fees and affiliate production in any significant manner. Meaning we haven’t done anything to change anything yet. In fact, after about a half a year what we’ve done is essentially bring back a few agencies to the state that they were in prior to the action we took. I don’t really think we’ve changed much there.

**John:** I don’t think that is accurate or fair in terms of the agencies that we’ve signed and also just the packaging deals that have not happened as a result of this action.

**Craig:** So they were packaging?

**John:** Some of these smaller agencies were packaging. Verve was packaging. As I believe Kaplan-Stahler had a package on a significant property as well. So these are agencies who I think given their druthers would love to continue packaging.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** They’ve decided to not package in order to sign this deal.

**Craig:** I will acknowledge that. But I think in turn you would probably agree that none of those agencies were packaging in any significant way, or at least in terms of the percentage of shows that are packaged. They were responsible for maybe a cumulative total of 1%.

**John:** A much smaller percent than the big four. Absolutely. No argument there.

**Craig:** And so when we began this fight – look, when Chris Keyser came on our show and the three of us were in violent agreement that we needed to do something about packaging fees and affiliate production, the three of us were talking about four agencies effectively, because those four agencies account for the greatest majority, I mean, a vast majority of all of the packaging fees and packages that are implemented and all of the affiliate production that is implemented.

So, yes, we can absolutely say we have signed Kaplan-Stahler. Or Verve. But I don’t think we can say that we have effectively engaged in negotiations with the four agencies that are responsible for the problem that we are all really angry about. I think sometimes people think like maybe I’m on the agencies’ side because I criticize the way we’re handling things, but I’m actually – it’s because I hate the stuff that the agencies are doing that I criticize the guild because I want the guild to do better.

And now we have a difference of opinion of how to accomplish that, but I think I would push back on you in the sense of, listen, yes, there was some sloppy language there, but there is a decent point to be made that because of the way we have handled things we have yet to negotiate effectively, nor have we shown a great willingness through behavior to negotiate effectively with those individual four agencies.

**John:** I would say that folks who attend the WGA public meetings will get a sense of sort of where the strategy is currently and where it’s headed to. And that the big four – negotiating with the big four agencies remains a priority.

**Craig:** Well that’s good to hear. I mean, because I’ve been pretty consistent about this all along. That is where our victory is. Some people I think – I’ve seen some things where some members of our union seem to feel that we’d be better off without them and I will just continue to maintain that down that path lies peril for us. It’s not that we’re being deprived of their wondrousness. It’s that we may be subject to some anti-wondrousness. I mean, just this week I got a call about something and I was like, ugh, and it involved an agency – not CAA – which was my agency. One of the other big four agencies. That lit me on fire. I mean, I was so angry. I was just like pouring gasoline into bottles and shoving rags and I was ready man.

And then I’m like, OK, let’s just figure out how to deal with this and stop this. But it is infuriating. Some of the behavior that they engage in is infuriating. And I want to win. And the way I at least think about winning is that we figure out how to get them back from what they’re doing into a place where they’re actually advocating for us as clients.

So, I think you brought up good points. I thought that some of the people pushing back on you brought up good points. I think that as long as we keep our eye on this – what you’re saying is a priority – I don’t know how we get to this priority because there’s a lot of now anger between these parties and a lot of mistrust. But whatever can happen, hopefully it happens sooner rather than later.

**John:** All right. So let’s take a meta moment here to look back at the discussion we just had. And so you and I did not convince each other of anything, but we expressed our ideas and our opinions on sort of where things have been, where they’re going, and what the best course of action is. The degree to which we can model that behavior for other folks I think would be terrific. One of the functions I sort of see myself as a person who is not running for reelection is to remind people both in big rooms and online that we are remarkably lucky. That we are remarkably lucky that we are some of the most talented writers out there. We’re some of the most highly-paid writers out there. We’re the only writers in the world who get to have a union that gets to represent them this way.

So, we are starting from a position of just tremendous luck and luxury. And the fact that we have so many people who care so passionately about what the future is for all of us writers is great. And so let’s all approach this from a perspective of we may disagree on ideas and tactics and strategies, but the degree to which we can compassionately disagree and not question people’s motives but question people’s ideas, that’s how we come out of this in strength.

**Craig:** 100%. We should be able to stress test each other’s ideas on these things. And we should be able to do it publicly. I don’t think that asking why we are doing this or that in some way is going to damage our solidarity. Our solidarity at least to me is not a function of our allegiance to any given leadership. Because if it were our solidarity would have to kind of whipsaw back and forth depending on who just got elected.

Our solidarity is based on our willingness as members, even when we disagree, to follow our working rules and send in our dues. And what that means is when there’s an action like this one and we have a working rule that says you can’t go back to your agent until this is solved, you don’t go back to your agent. That’s where solidarity is. It’s not in agreeing with every single thing either Phyllis Nagy or David Goodman says. That would be – down that path essentially is just sort of a, I don’t know, a kind of a poverty of imagination and thought.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I do think you’ve put your finger on it that as we go through these things to the extent that we can avoid deciding that some people are just bad because they think a certain thing about a strategy we should – it’s a shame. Because I do feel like every single person that is running in this race, every single one of them, legitimately wants to do something that they believe is best for writers. Nobody is getting a payoff or a kickback or anything. I mean, there’s been some crazy allegations made. So, yeah, let’s just reduce the temperature a bit. And I think maybe give ourselves credit for being strong enough to withstand an election which we’re supposed to have anyway.

**John:** Yep. And honestly I would rather have some disharmony than apathy. And so many years we’ve had apathy where we’ve had to basically twist people’s arms just to get enough people to actually run for the board or to run for office. So, it’s a good problem to have that we have many people who want to do this unpaid job for two years.

**Craig:** I completely agree. And one of the downsides to the – you know, we never really had uncontested elections and then suddenly we did just because we couldn’t find people to run. And one of the downsides is you start to create a generation of members who are not used to contested elections. And we can be frightened by them, even. And we don’t want that for the very reason you’re saying. We want a good competition of ideas and as long as our members are following our working rules and going by the kind of action that we’re taking then we do have meaningful solidarity. We don’t need solidarity of opinion. We need solidarity of behavior. And that’s important. And I don’t think that we should ever put something like an election in the context of hurting our leverage or anything like that.

If an election hurts our leverage than our leverage is terrible. That’s how I guess I would put it. So, you know, hopefully yeah, people can kind of just be nice to each other because they’re writers. And we deserve that from each other.

**John:** Absolutely. All right, let’s do a final bit of follow up. Back in Episode 399 we sat down with a bunch of studio executives to talk about how they give notes and how they could give better notes. Steph Cowan wrote in, Craig would you read what Steph wrote for us?

**Craig:** Sure. Steph writes, “I was right in the middle of a what-am-I-doing-with-my-life-I’m-not-cut-out-for-this moment when I heard your episode Talking Austin in Austin with Lindsay Doran. At the time I’d been working in the theater industry developing new musicals for about eight years. I’d been told that I’m too nice and cared too much to be a commercial producer and that I’m better suited for the lit department of a non-profit instead.

“Then Lindsay Doran said something like as a producer I consider myself the guardian of the storytelling. And I teared up. This was exactly how I felt. It’s still how I feel. And to hear a successful, admirable producer say it was deeply reassuring. I felt that reassurance again when Craig said I think you’re told not to be vulnerable, addressing studio executives in Episode 399. He’s right. We are, in the Broadway world anyway.

“Knowing that showing our love for the story and the team is strength gives me hope that maybe I am cut out for this. It’s also very exciting for me to hear how to give more effective notes. I can’t wait to share this episode with my colleagues.”

John, this is great. Especially because Steph comes from Broadway and we love Broadway.

**John:** We love Broadway. I’m headed to Broadway soon to see four shows in a very short period of time. But my experience making a Broadway show is that there is that function of a producer in terms of being a cheerleader, in terms of being a person who is putting a giant hug around an idea which is still forming. It is really crucial. And so you look for those ones who can do what Lindsay Doran says and sort of be a champion and a challenger and a person pushing you to make the very best thing. So, it sounds like that’s what Steph was taking out of these two episodes.

**Craig:** You know what? I’m starting to think this podcast is a good idea.

**John:** Maybe so. Maybe you should keep doing just a few more.

**Craig:** Why not?

**John:** Unless it turns out that we are wrong about the words of English.

**Craig:** Let’s find out.

**John:** “Hi Craig. I’m one of those Johnny Came Lately show listeners who have washed up because of Chernobyl. Sorry. I’m sure a bunch of people have already pointed this out but I just listened to a second podcast where you poured scorn on “heigth” specifically, characterizing it as a construction of illiterate youth. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is old school. It was good enough for Milton and it’s good enough for us, right?”

And then there’s a link, line 324 if you’re following the link in the show notes. “Cheers and thanks for a really well put together podcast.”

**Craig:** Well thank you anonymous writer. I’m glad you washed ashore as a result of Chernobyl. So, of course, I felt a little bit red-cheeked here. I mean, am I wrong? Is heigth a word? Maybe it is. If it’s good enough for Milton – that sounded like a pretty smart phrase.

So I went ahead and looked at the reference here which is, of course, to Paradise Lost, book two, line 324. And in line 324 it says, “In heigth or depth, still first and last will reign.” OK, that’s embarrassing. But I’d like to point out that five lines later it says, “War hath determined us and foiled with loss.” War is spelled with two Rs and foiled has no E. We don’t do that anymore. This is archaic. It is not applicable.

I mean, if we’re going to say that heigth is acceptable because it’s in Milton I guess we can start spelling war W-A-R-R. No. I reject this. I reject this.

**John:** [laughs] Yeah. And you know what? For arbitrary reasons. Language can change. Language can grow, evolve. Absolutely. But if Craig says no, Craig can say no. And he’s just not going to use that word. He’s not going to use the heigth. He’s not going to accept it.

**Craig:** And I’m also going to continue to say that people are wrong. Unless, here’s the exception: if somebody randomly says heigth and I’m like did you just say heigth, and they said, “Well yeah, I know, but Milton,” I’ll say stop, you can do it. Just you.

**John:** So the Milton clause is what gets you out of it.

**Craig:** Milton clause.

**John:** The Milton clause. All right. Let’s do our marquee topic. This was inspired by a conversation with Katie Silberman two episodes back. Also I just saw Andrea Berloff’s movie The Kitchen and I had a Twitter conversation with Alison Luhrs who is a designer at Wizards of the Coast and she’s going to be coming on the show in a future episode. But they were all talking about the process of writing. Katie Silberman did all these pages in advance before she started actually writing. She would dialogue pages endlessly to do stuff.

Andrea Berloff was talking about the research she did for The Kitchen. Alison Luhrs was talking about these giant encyclopedias they built for these fantasy worlds that they’re doing for Match of the Gathering and for Dungeons and Dragons.

And so I want to talk just a bit about how do you know when you’ve done enough of that prep stuff and that you’re really ready to write. And Craig and I have different perspectives on this. We do different kind of advanced work. But I want to talk about how each of us feels like, OK, I’m ready to actually start writing scenes.

**Craig:** Yeah. So this may be one of those things where we talk through it and ultimately what it boils down to is we each have our own finger print about this. And what it comes down to is when are you comfortable. When do you feel like you actually can do the good stuff? Which is finding yourself in that moment and writing out a scene and feeling really good about it.

And for me, and this has been this way for so long, I mean, it’s almost getting more this way: I really love to prepare. I love to know exactly what every scene is going to be and what happens in it, even though of course I can deviate. I’m one of those people that goes all the way basically to I need to know what the script is before I start writing the script. And I guess maybe in that regard I’m probably closer to Katie Silberman than I am to you I’m thinking.

**John:** Yeah. And I’m very much not that. But I think the kinds of things that I want to know are probably similar to things you want to know, it’s just that you’re actually doing a written down version of it and I’m just carrying a bunch of stuff in my head and not writing it down.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And why it’s relevant really for this season and this moment is I think you’re just about to start writing something new, or you have already started writing something new?

**Craig:** I’m about to start writing something new. Correct.

**John:** As am I. So this is top of mind for me. Also this is development season. So this is when new TV shows are getting pitched and people are starting to write them. So a lot of people are at this moment right now in town.

**Craig:** There’s still a season to these things?

**John:** There’s still a season certainly for broadcast. We’ve been through staffing and now the folks who are generally not in a room on a show are developing for stuff and they’re going out and pitching things to networks and studios. So that still exists.

**Craig:** All right. Well, good.

**John:** So let’s talk about the idea. And so for me before I start actually writing any scenes I want to know what is this movie or show, what does it look like/feel like if you sort of squint your mind a little bit. What is the shape of it? What category is it? What does it feel like? What does the music feel like? This is the time where I might start putting together a playlist of the music that feels like the show or the movie to me. I think about the trailer. I think about the one sheet. I just feel like pulling back far out, even not looking at specific story, what kind of movie is that. And I need to know that really early on and certainly before I start writing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Obviously I’ve just sort of given my thing away, but speaking specifically of that, that’s the big one. You can – I think anyone can start whenever they want, but after that. Because I think a lot of people think that what they need to start writing is an idea. And an idea, if it’s just the plot, if it’s just the log line, that’s actually not enough.

**John:** Oh not at all.

**Craig:** Not enough. If what you have is, ooh, what if a guy woke up and every day was the same day. That’s not enough. You need to know about why that idea matters.

**John:** Yeah. A thing we talk about on the show a lot is that many ways screenwriting is making a movie in your head and then writing the description of like that movie that you see in your head. And so if you don’t have the basis for sort of like what does this look like in my head, what does this sound like, what does it feel like, then you’re not anywhere close to really starting to write. So I suspect for Chernobyl you had done the research and you had a sense of like visually what does this feel like. What is going to feel like to be watching this show? And you have to have that early on.

And to me that comes before the characters. The characters are the next really crucial step here, but I need to know sort of what kind of thing am I trying to do and who are the characters who are populating this world. Not just my hero. I need to know what are the relationships between the central characters. Where would we find them at the start? Where would they get to by the end? What is the trajectory that they’re going through?

So even though unlike Craig I’m not going to do a full outline that’s sort of going scene by scene, I definitely need to know who are these people and what is the journey that they’re going to be going on through this block of time.

**Craig:** Yeah. You can see your guide posts along the way. So you understand no matter what’s happening, even if you’re not necessarily writing from a description of what the scene should be, you understand where you’ve come from and you understand where you’re going. And if you don’t know where you’re coming from and you don’t know where you’re going, that’s when screenplays start getting very purpley and self-indulgent and talky and flabby. I mean, I’ve seen this so many times where I just think they didn’t know.

**John:** They didn’t know.

**Craig:** They were just writing their way through a forest hoping that they would stumble across something. And eventually they do, but that’s their problem. I’m not here to go on your fact-finding mission. I’m here to go on a carefully curated tour of your deep dark forest. So, I mean, you can obviously find your way through those things, but you can’t show it to anybody until you’ve–

**John:** Yeah. And the thing is you can have your general idea, you can have your characters, but unless you sort of knew what is specifically the story of this movie, which comes down to a thing we’ve talked a lot about recently which is what is that central dramatic question, what is that central argument, what is the thing the movie or the episode of television is really about. And if you don’t know that going in – sometimes you can succeed honestly. There’s been stuff I’ve started writing where I didn’t really quite know what is that thematic thing that’s pulling it all together, but I had – even if I couldn’t say it aloud I had a sense of what it felt like. I had a sense of what I was going for. What space this occupied. And it’s the scripts that you read where I just don’t think you actually know where you’re going are the ones where they didn’t have a sense of that right when they started writing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, listening to you, what you’re not talking about is plot.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** I mean, I think this is where people go wrong. They think they’re ready to write when they know what the plot is. The plot – first of all, I don’t even know how you know what the plot is unless you know the things that you’re talking about. Because at that point then you’re probably just creating something episodic and plotty with no purpose or meaning or anything greater than that.

You do need to do all this kind of internal psychological examination of why this story should exist. I mean, when you write a screenplay you are writing a proposal for some entity to invest tens of millions of dollars into its creation. Why? Why? Why would anyone do that to your thing? Well that’s the question you’re asking yourself now and that’s the question you need to answer before you start.

**John:** Yeah. At a certain point you are going to start thinking about plot. You’re going to be thinking about what are the moments. What are the set pieces? What are the moments in the story where things take a big turn? If this were a broadcast episode or pilot you’d be thinking what are the act breaks? Where are the moments where things really take a big turn, where are the cliffhangers in the story?

Before I would start writing I would have to have a sense of what are those big really visual things that are going to show what has happened in the story. So that’s where I need a sense of what is the world like. What is the world like at the start of the movie? What are the different sort of sets or places I’m going to be seeing over the course of this story?

I say this on the podcast a lot, but Susan Stroman, director of Big Fish, said she never wanted to see the same set twice. I don’t hold myself to that, but I definitely like her sense that we should not be coming back to the same place without there having been a change. Without something fundamental having been changed about the character or that place or the situation if we’re coming back to this thing. So what is the geographic journey of this story and what is the color journey through the story. What is changing about how this looks on screen as I’m going through this story?

I’ll have that sense pretty early on, generally before I’ve started writing any scenes.

**Craig:** This goes a little bit to that notion of the dialectic. You’re creating something and then it must change. There must be a constant change happening in storytelling. If you end up in that flat space or that circular space people will start to feel bored and for good reason. You’re treading water. You’re almost wasting time. I don’t know how else to put it. You’re literally wasting people’s time.

Good stories are narratives in which people’s relationships with each other, themselves, and the world around them are constantly changing. Every single scene exists in order to create a change. So you’re absolutely right. Coming back around to some place you’ve been before is only interesting if you’re different or that place is different. And the contrast is the whole purpose, right? So, these things need to be determined. If you end up just sort of noodling your way I think you probably will find yourself in that same diner having a similar conversation again.

**John:** Yep. Let’s talk about the dangers of starting too early. And starting the process of actually writing scenes too early before you have that stuff figured out. To me it’s that in the times where I’ve done it myself I outline my supply lines, like I get too far ahead of myself and I just haven’t built the infrastructure behind me to get myself forward, to get myself to this next thing. And so, man, I wrote a great first ten pages. Man, that’s a good first 30 pages. Wow, I have no idea how to get through the next 90. I didn’t have enough story figured out or I didn’t have enough figured out about how I was going to get from this point to a point I know I’m going to head towards later on. So outrunning myself is a real problem if I haven’t really thought through where stuff is.

I’ve often found myself where I have the right hero in the wrong story. I have the right story with the wrong hero. If I haven’t done that real thinking I might have smooshed these two things together but they’re not well suited for each other. And I would have been able to figure that out if I really thought through all those other things before I started writing scenes.

**Craig:** Yeah. I also think one of the dangers of starting too early is inefficiency of storytelling. As you go through you will be incapable of writing tightly, meaning everything has been really carefully considered so that the audience has experienced a pure storytelling unfold in front of them, a kind of a pure storytelling unfold in front of them, rather than a meandering or a wandering about or any kind of circular motion. But rather everything has been carefully machined so that there is – we understand that scenes have transitions and that this scene is a reflection of a scene earlier. And that this moment recontextualizes that moment.

There is essentially craft going on. And part of craft is efficiency of craft. It’s no wasted space. No wasted cloth. No wasted movement. But rather an elegance as if this thing had landed whole and already told in your lap. And it’s hard to do that when you’re kind of making it up as you go.

**John:** Yep. Let’s also talk about the dangers of starting too late. And I don’t know if you’ve encountered this much in your career, but there have been projects where I kind of did all the prep work and I maybe overdid the prep work a little bit and by the time I started writing I kind of gotten past it. Where the thing that attracted me to it was no longer attractive to me and I was looking at this as a chore rather than a thing I was excited to write.

And so I think part of the reason why sometimes I don’t do the laborious preparation is that I’m afraid of falling out of love with something, or being distracted by something else that’s newer and shinier. I want to start writing when I’m still really attracted and excited by this property. There’s a passion to it. And sometimes if I’ve burned off that passion in outlines and other things, especially if I had to show them with other people, then the actual starting to write is no longer thrilling for me.

**Craig:** Interesting. Yeah, I can totally see that being a problem. Certainly I think one of the hallmarks of starting too late is you’re dealing from fear. Something is holding you – you’re afraid to write. I think a lot of times people abuse the pre-writing process, whether it’s outlining or research not to set themselves up for writing success but rather to avoid writing failure. They’re only valuable to set yourself up for success. They are only useful tools. They can’t forestall any trouble. So at some point you’re going to have to dive in.

For me, I do feel a little bit of a sense of exhaustion and completion once I’m done with a 50-page scriptment. But then take a week or two and then when you start writing what you find is – at least I find – that the act of now full creation of a scene is invigorating again. That rather than thinking about an entire movie and a whole series of movements and character changes and resolutions and reversals, all I have to think about is this one little short film. And that is – that kind of makes me fall in love with it all over again. And I get to do that without worrying that I don’t know what to do next, because I do know what to do next.

**John:** Yeah. That is definitely an advantage to that is – what’s ironic is that I’m a person who tends to write out of sequence. You’re more likely to write in sequence. You could write out of sequence probably more easily–

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because any of those moments – you could take a moment from page 30 of your script and just write it because you know it’s going to fit back in. I will write something because it’s what appeals to me to write that day. So even within I think all of our suggestions about figuring out adequate preparation and that everyone is different, it really does come down to people ultimately recognize what they need to have done before they start writing. And you should try some different things to figure out what works for you so you actually get scripts written and finished that you are happy with.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, maybe a general rule of thumb is if you find yourself frightened while you’re writing, and scared of the dark, then maybe you should be putting more time in ahead of time. If you find yourself feeling a bit dry and a bit like a horse on a lead, then maybe you need to do less to start with so that you have a little bit more of a sense of play while you’re going. You just have to dial into yourself.

But listen to what your mind is telling you as you go. Because none of this is orthodoxy. It’s all really about what makes your unique brain put out its best work.

**John:** Agreed. All right, let’s take two questions. First we have Leslie from Australia. She writes, “I’m questioning my sanity because I’m currently in a disagreement with a producer over what constitutes a polish versus a draft and I’m hoping you can help shed some light on this. I was hired and paid to write a feature for this producer. He and his backer loved what I did. I gave them a couple free polishes afterwards to address some feedback we got from a mucky-muck in the industry and they were delighted with that, too.

“A second producer has come onboard and given his notes on what he thinks needs changing. The first producer and his backer now agree with him and they’ve asked me how much I’d charge for a polish, or as they put it, ‘A strong polish.’ I told them the changes they’re asking for amounted to a draft, not a polish, or even a ‘strong polish,’ whatever that is, but they disagreed. So, when I gave them a reasonable quote for a draft they rejected it. I would love to get your take on what a polish is versus a draft. I may be way off base – I don’t think I am – but I’m willing to be schooled.

“Also, I’ve never heard of the term ‘strong polish’ before. Is that even a thing?”

Craig?

**Craig:** That is not a thing.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No. No, no, no, Leslie. That’s not a thing. That is a term invented by con artists to get you to do more for less. I mean, that’s all that’s going on here. They want more for less.

Here’s a rough rule, because there is not a ton of super specificity about this. And when you say a draft, for those of us here we would probably call that a rewrite. In my mind a polish is something that happens in about three weeks, or less. And if it’s more than that, it’s a rewrite. That’s kind of roughly how it goes. So, that’s sort of what I would say. And then the question is how much can you do in three weeks? Whatever you’re comfortable with doing.

So generally speaking a polish would not be re-rigging the plot. It would be fixing some characters. It would be maybe one or two characters need some work on their dialogue. There’s two scenes that need kind of reinventing or reimagining. That feels like a polish.

If they’ve got systematic issues that they need you to address or want you to address, that’s a rewrite. And if they don’t want to pay for it they can gaslight you all they want. They can tell you it’s a polish all they want. They can invent new phrases like strong polish. But that’s gas-lighting. They’re just trying to get more for less.

**John:** So, Leslie, even if you were working here, even if you were working in this town with schedules of minimums and things like this, you would still be dealing with this question of calling this a rewrite, calling this a polish. Them trying to get you to do more for a little bit less.

WGA has specific terms for what polish means and for what a rewrite means. Polish involves character work and dialogue. Things that change story in a major way tend to be rewrites. But functionally Craig is correct when he says it’s really more about time. That’s what we think about when we think about a polish. A polish is a matter of just a week or two, three weeks. If it’s multiple weeks and a lot of work that tends to be a rewrite.

And so Leslie I think you were right to be suspicious and I’m sorry that this didn’t work out on this draft. But whether they called that a polish or a rewrite, they didn’t want to pay you money for it and that’s where I think it comes down to it.

**Craig:** Well they wanted to pay her something, just not what she deserves. And I’ll point out you’ve already done a couple of free polishes.

**John:** Yes!

**Craig:** So this is what happens. We are not rewarded for “good behavior.” We’re punished for it. They don’t look at you as somebody who has done them a solid favor and therefore they now owe you something. What they do is look at you as somebody that they exploited successfully and so they will continue to exploit you. That’s what bullies do.

Now, when it comes to capitalism that’s essentially what capitalism is. It’s economic bullying. And they’re going to do what you’re going to do. And so you’re going to have to stand up for yourself and say no. And based on the way you’re describing this I’m just wondering where the copyright for this rests. You’re in Australia. I don’t think they have work-for-hire there. You may have more leverage than you think. I think it’s time for you to get somebody else involved to help represent you with them.

You’ve probably seen a lot of cop shows where the job of the police is to convince their suspect to not bring a lawyer in because if they bring a lawyer in it’s going to be much harder to get them to spill their guts and confess. Well, this is sort of like that. These guys don’t want you to bring a lawyer in. So, bring a lawyer in.

**John:** Agreed. Do you want to take Justin’s question?

**Craig:** Justin from Hawthorne asks, “Hello Screen Wizards.” I like Justin. “I’m writing today to see if the tales of the Do Not List from Hell exist in present times. I’ve heard rumors of this list but I can’t imagine it to be true. I’m worried I might be on it and I’m praying that the years of hard work attempts to crack open a career as a screenwriter won’t be thwarted by earnest and possibly haphazard times when maybe I was too eager or submitted my material too early? If it’s real, can somebody who is on this list ever get off of it?”

**John:** So I provided some off-mic context for Craig because this Do Not List is apparently an idea that producers or studios or other folks in town have a list of like never hire this person, or like there’s a do not list. This person is a hack and don’t hire them.

I think individual people will have their lists of writers they don’t want to hire, but it’s generally because they worked with the writers and the writers were bad for them. You writing something that wasn’t good, it doesn’t help you, but it doesn’t hurt you for a long time. It doesn’t stick around. People’s memories are kind of short when it comes to stuff they didn’t like. If they read a script that they really like of yours, they’ll hire you on to do more things.

So, I would say don’t be worried about your early work. Always be mindful if you’re sending stuff out make sure it’s good and it’s professional and that it’s showing your best light. But if you didn’t, stop worrying about it. Instead worry about writing good new stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah. When people read something that someone has submitted, an original or something like that, and they don’t like it, they throw it out. They don’t run to a special list called Oh My God This Person Wrote a Terrible Script. Because they know as well as anybody that somebody can write a terrible script and then four weeks write something wonderful. That does happen, right? Sometimes we’re working in the wrong genre. Sometimes for whatever reason it just doesn’t work.

John is correct. There are lists. First of all, there are lists. It’s important for people to know that. I’ve seen them. They exist. There are lists. And those lists are people that either a studio or a producer believes are well worth hiring and working with and they can make levels of them. I mean, the whole phrase A-list came from original list had A, B, C. And there are lists of, nope, we’re not hiring that person here. They usually don’t write that down because they don’t want to deal with any legal issues, but they are always on that list because there’s been a bad employment experience.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** Not because they wrote a bad script. If the studio hasn’t paid for it, they’re not going to blame you for it, dude. Most scripts are bad. How about that? You’re going to be fine.

**John:** Yep. He’s going to be fine.

**Craig:** He’s going to be fine.

**John:** Let’s do our One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things this week. The first is a delicious cookie. It is the Oreo Thin.

**Craig:** I love those.

**John:** If you’ve not tried the Oreo Thins, they’re good and they’re so much better. And they’re crispier. So you owe it to yourself to try an Oreo Thin. Even if you don’t really love Oreos you’ll probably love Oreo Thins. They are terrific.

The second is a thin book. It is Monsters and Creatures: A Young Adventurer’s Guide. It’s by the D&D people. And what I like about it is it’s designed for young middle grade readers and they’re smaller books. They’re hardcover, but they just have all the cool illustrations of dragons and owlbears and all this stuff. Basically art work that Wizards probably had sitting around and they found a good way to repackage it and write some new text. It’s written by Jim Zub.

**Craig:** Hold on.

**John:** What a great name, right?

**Craig:** I think Jim Zub is in the monster manual. I think I’ve faced off a crimson Jim Zub.

**John:** They’re nicely done and to me it feels like if I were a six-year-old kid who was obsessed with dinosaurs I would also be obsessed with these books because it’s dragons and cool stuff. There’s other books – Warriors and Weapons, Dungeons and Tombs. So if you have somebody who you want to give this kind of gift to who is not really ready for actual D&D it feels like a good starter thing.

**Craig:** You round the corner and see in the room a giant Zub. What do you do? [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. So is a Zub one of the things where you stab with your sword and then your sword rusts away?

**Craig:** Probably. That seems Zub-like.

**John:** Zub-like.

**Craig:** It’s definitely Zub-like. Well, listen, you had two One Cool Things. I’m going to give our listeners a break and just say they deserve two One Cool Things. And also I didn’t have one.

**John:** That sounds good. So, Craig, I’ll give you half credit on the Oreo Thins because you also agree they’re good, right?

**Craig:** I have eaten them, so yeah.

**John:** All right. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Michael Karman. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. But for short questions, on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. We get them up about four days after the episode airs.

People do recaps on Reddit so you can check the recap for this episode and a couple episodes back if you’d like. You can find the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net or download 50-episode seasons at store.johnaugust.com.

Craig, it’s good to be back with you doing a normal Skype show.

**Craig:** Very good to be back with you and we’ve got some really interesting shows coming up, so–

**John:** We do. I’m excited. And off-mic we’re going to talk about some big special guests.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Have a good week.

**Craig:** You too.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Myth of No Negotiation](https://johnaugust.com/2019/the-myth-of-no-negotiation)
* Deadline’s “Exclusive” on [John’s Blogpost](https://deadline.com/2019/08/john-august-wga-long-slog-agency-deal-negotiations-1202662054/)
* [John Milton, Paradise Lost](https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/pl/book_2/text.shtml)
* [Monsters Creatures: A Young Adventurer’s Guide](https://amzn.to/31xMkk7) by Jim Zub
* [Oreo Thins](https://www.oreo.com/Thins)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Michael Karman ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_413_ready_to_write.mp3)