Archives for 2019

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/how-do-you-like-your-stakes)

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 402 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the program we’re going to be talking about the idea of stakes, what it means for a writer, and what it means for a character. We’ll also talk a little bit about Aladdin, fandom, and of course some agency stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But first we got to hype up our live show again. That’s coming up really soon, June 13, at the Ace Hotel. It’s a Thursday night.

It is a benefit for the amazing charity called Hollywood Heart. Our guests include Alec Berg of Silicon Valley and Barry, Rob McElhenney of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and his new Apple show, but also we’ve added Kourtney Kang of Fresh off the Boat and a new show coming up. She is fantastic. I got to work with her on a project. So we’re so excited to have these TV moguls up on stage with us.

And there will be more stuff to do too. We have some prizes. We have giveaways. We have special shirts we’re making just for that night so people buy your tickets if you have not bought your tickets yet.

**Craig:** Yeah. And correct me if I’m wrong, and I’m not wrong so you can’t correct me.

**John:** You’re never wrong.

**Craig:** I’m never wrong. Not about these things. And we have McQuarrie on a loop saying, “I hate to say it but Craig is right.” Hollywood Heart, which is the charity that this benefits, is a legal charity. Meaning if you buy tickets you can deduct them from your taxes.

**John:** I suspect that’s true. Because – and the actual value you’ll receive is just knowledge and joy.

**Craig:** And power.

**John:** Power. Yes.

**Craig:** And love.

**John:** We’re giving away power. Yeah. Love.

**Craig:** Yeah. So I mean why wouldn’t you come to this? It’s a great cause. And you know what? We’re in a bigger place. We got ambitious here. We need to fill a bigger venue so we need you listeners. If you are in the Los Angeles area–

**John:** We need your physical bodies in that space.

**Craig:** Yeah, we need you.

**John:** So that we will feel together.

**Craig:** I mean, look, in all seriousness, you know me. I’m perfectly happy talking to an empty room. In fact, I’m happier talking to an empty room. In fact, no one come. But really here’s the thing: it’s for charity. We’re trying to help kids. So, that’s why you need to show up. It’s not so much for me. Show up for John and the kids.

**John:** Yep. And our guests because our guests are phenomenal.

**Craig:** And our guests.

**John:** And there could be one or two more coming, but we can’t say that yet.

**Craig:** We’re always full of surprises.

**John:** Great. So hyping is done. I had my showing up at a place experience this week. This was the premiere for Aladdin. So Aladdin came out this past weekend in the US and most of the world. So I went to the premiere on Tuesday and it was weird. So I don’t think we’ve really talked about movie premieres so I thought we could spend a few minutes talking about what it’s like to go to a premiere as a writer.

So I guess, let me start how the day begin, because obviously I don’t need hair and makeup because I look just the same no matter what.

**Craig:** Well, makeup. [laughs] You could use a little makeup.

**John:** I get a little blush – no, I do nothing. So basically I get in a car, the studio sends a car, so me, Mike, and my friend Dan, we all went to the premiere together. We hop in a car. We got to Hollywood. This is at the El Capitan. They block off streets around it because they actually have blocked off all of Hollywood Boulevard for this premiere. So it’s actually difficult to get there.

They try – the publicists try to get you there so early. So the premiere started at 6:30. They wanted the car to leave my house at 4:30.

**Craig:** Oh god. Come on.

**John:** I’m like 10 minutes away. And so I said, no, 5:30 at the earliest. So we get in the car there. We get to the place where they’re dropping us off. There’s a greeter there who was fantastic. She took us around and did everything. And I specifically said that I wanted to skip the red carpet, so we’ll get into why I wanted to skip the red carpet, but Craig what’s been your experience when you do a premiere and doing the red carpet? Do you actually answer questions along that red carpet?

**Craig:** I have. It’s only been for certain movies, but I have. It’s weird. Definitely – it was less weird for Chernobyl because they seem to want to ask a writer questions in television. [laughs] When you’re in the movie business, so you walk down this red carpet and all these – you know, people have seen this I suppose in movies. The red carpet and all those people have their cameras and they’re like, “Look over here. Look over here.” And then the writer walks down and it gets real quiet all of a sudden.

**John:** Yeah. So there’s usually a handler beside you saying like, “This is Craig Mazin, the writer of the film.” Or they point to specific people who are already going to be asking you questions. Sometimes there’s little video crews.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Sometimes it’s just a person with a microphone there to talk with you. And, hey, can you tell everyone at Cat Fancy Magazine about Frankenweenie? And it’s like, are there any cats in Frankenweenie? I’m like, yes, there is. Let me tell you about Mr. Whiskers.

**Craig:** Yeah. And sometimes you speak to people who are from other countries. And, look, it’s all part of the machine. I mean, the thing to remember about these premieres, which I think a lot of writers don’t quite get early on, is that the purpose of the premiere is not to celebrate you, or the director, or the cast, or the movie. The purpose of the premiere is to sell tickets. It is designed to create stuffing for magazines and websites.

And so the parts that get the most stuffing generated that’s where they care. Meaning typically actors.

**John:** Yeah. Because those are the ones who are going to actually move copies of magazines if there were still magazines, but like clicks on websites.

**Craig:** Correct. Like if Will Smith for some reason was not able to go that day, because he had something else going on, they would move the premiere. [laughs] You know, it’s like he’s the thing that’s going to get all of the attention, right? I mean, he is the biggest name. So, it becomes that.

I mean, I watched it first hand at The Hangover 2 premiere. It was extraordinary. And it was right across the street. So Disney runs its family premieres at El Capitan and across the street you have Mann’s Chinese where a lot of big premieres take place. And they close off the street and it’s madness and people are there to see – they’re there to see Bradley Cooper.

**John:** Yeah. They’re not there to see Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** No! No. No one even in my house is there to see Craig Mazin.

**John:** So, approaching this premiere, this is a movie that I had worked on, very hard. I had stopped working on the movie. I had seen it several times. I had given notes on it. But it was not fundamentally my movie. And I knew I did not want to be answering a lot of press questions along the way because I can smile and sort of like, “I’m so excited to be here,” give those generic answers. But it was just going to be awkward and weird.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And I didn’t sort of want to give some honest answers on certain things. And so I said like, OK, I will go but we’re going to skip the whole red carpet thing. And my handler was fantastic. She whisked me through this little back way so I didn’t have to do any of the red carpet stuff.

And then you get into the theater, which the El Capitan Theater is beautiful inside.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Intimate but beautiful. And there’s like two other people inside the theater. And so even after delaying going there so early we had about an hour to kill.

**Craig:** I know. I know.

**John:** For everyone who was on the red carpet to start it.

**Craig:** I know. The timing of it all is so weird. At some point they start yelling at everybody to go into the theater, but no one is going in. I’ve got to be honest with you. I do not like these events at all. And if I can avoid them I do. If I don’t have credit on a movie but I’ve worked on the movie and I get an invitation to go–

**John:** I don’t go.

**Craig:** I can’t remember the last time I went. I do not like premieres because they’re actually not fun ways to see a movie. It’s so much of a hassle. And I just care about the movie.

**John:** I’ll take that back. The one time I did go was the first Iron Man. And it was a fun premiere and I was happy for everyone involved. And so I was there to celebrate them, but I just loved that it was not about me at all.

**Craig:** And, you know what? I’ll take it back, too. There was one. I went to Hail Caesar, because I was just really excited. I wanted to see it early. And you know what? I was not disappointed at all. I love that movie.

**John:** That feels like a good movie to see with a big crowd and with a group around you. And that is actually genuinely the fun of seeing these movies is because in the previous incarnations where I’d seen Aladdin I’d seen it in a screening room by myself, or nearly by myself, and so I’m watching this thing that is supposed to be a comedy and it is not funny to me because I’m sitting here scribbling into a notebook about things that I would encourage them to work on.

And then to see it with a crowd it’s like, oh, yeah, those are jokes that I wrote. And those jokes are getting laughs. And you actually get spontaneous applause at moments. Yes, the crowd is sort of extra hyped up because they know the folks involved and they’re applauding people’s credits as they show up. But it’s also a joyous moment because also it’s new for people because none of them have been spoiled by reviews or other bits of spoilers that have come out about what actually happens in the movie. So it was genuinely fun to see it with that group.

I met one of the composers who did the great new song for it, so that was cool. So, I’m glad I went to the premiere of Aladdin is the short summary.

**Craig:** I’m glad you went, too. It’s good. I’m glad. You know what? We’ve got to stay positive.

**John:** We got to stay positive. And it looks like, you know, we’re recording this on a Friday but it looks like the movie is going to do pretty well for the weekend and that’s a good thing, too.

**Craig:** It’s Aladdin from Disney.

**John:** It is Aladdin from Disney. That was kind of built in to the whole thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean not to take anything away from the accomplishment, but we’re talking about degrees of success at that point. There’s no chance that people aren’t going to show up. It’s Aladdin. It’s A Whole New World. For You and Me.

**John:** Basically thank you everyone who went out to see it over the weekend. I hope you enjoy it. I’m happy it actually turned out in sort of the right kind of PG. It’s truly a PG that you can take younger kids to. And I’m happy with a lot of how stuff went in the movie.

**Craig:** How many murders, onscreen murders, do you get before you get bumped into PG-13?

**John:** I don’t know. There is one onscreen murder that I really, really argued to cut. Sidebar here for a moment. It’s a thing that you encountered in so many different cuts of movies you’ve seen before where there’s a scene that is wedged in there to establish a character and it breaks the flow of everything else around it. Just like, oh no, this guy is a bad guy. See how bad he is? And I really, really wanted that scene to go and they didn’t listen to me.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, you know, this is – it’s what happens. You see, I mean–

**John:** It’s a collaborative medium. Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s a collaborative medium and maybe – I think what you should do is maneuver yourself into a position where you don’t have to collaborate that much. [laughs] And I’ve said this on the show many times. There is a way of doing something where you are going to do it mostly by yourself. You are going to make mistakes but the mistakes will be consistent with everything else because it all came from one brain.

It’s the mix and match of it all. Somebody may have a great idea. You know what the problem is? That character we’re supposed to be scared of him, but we haven’t seen him do anything bad. We should establish how evil he is. Great idea. Execution-ally there’s no chance of success because that came from somewhere else. It’s like throwing some weird instrument into the middle of another song.

**John:** And that’s a thing that happens in the writing stage all the time, too. Even what I’m writing right now, there’s a scene that I would kind of love to establish a little bit earlier in the script but like there’s no place to put that without breaking everything else around it. So, you know what? I have to do the hard work of figuring out, OK, if it is coming in at this later moment how can I make it work as this later moment beat. Because it’s not the same scene that would be happening earlier in the movie.

**Craig:** This is the life of the writer.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Writing and editing. They’re closely tied together.

We need to talk about the WGA and the ATA. But I would propose Craig, because last week it went on a long time, maybe could I set a three-minute timer and when the timer goes off we’re just done talking about it?

**Craig:** I need ten seconds.

**John:** All right. I’m starting three minutes, but if it goes less than that that’s great. And go.

**Craig:** Well, last week I was praying to the skies that everybody get back to the table. And they’re getting back to the table. Can’t claim causality there. I’m just happy that it happened. I’m optimistic and I’m very hopeful that you guys in leadership and the agency people can find a deal together.

**John:** Craig, you said you prayed to the skies and heaven, so this is a religious conversion for you is what I’m hearing. That you now understand that there is an all-powerful creator behind these things?

**Craig:** Sort of. By the skies and the heavens I’m referring to myself. So I’m the member of a new religion. The religion of–

**John:** Craigism?

**Craig:** It’s Craigism. And our lord’s prayer, “I hate to say it, but Craig is right.” [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Yeah, wouldn’t it be so funny if your first disciple was Chris McQuarrie?

**Craig:** My only disciple.

**John:** We should also briefly mention, because we have two minutes left on this time, which we didn’t even need. So another thing that happened this week was – I saw you single this out on Twitter – a writer who had been represented at Gersh shows up for a meeting at Fox. They say like, “Oh, no, your meeting was canceled.” And Gersh confirmed that they had canceled the meeting after he had fired them. That was not a god look for that agency.

**Craig:** No. That’s just dishonorable behavior. And even worse it is ignorant. This is not – in theory this will have an end. And we will want to return to agencies. And new writers are going to want to go to agencies. And Gersh will be one of those agencies, except now if anybody were to ask me about Gersh I would say they’re not great because as an institution they thought that would be a good idea. That’s a terrible idea.

That implies a poor sense of judgment. And that’s shameful. Shameful and stupid.

**John:** I knew almost nothing about Gersh, but this is the only thing I’m associating with Gersh right now is this incident. And so that ain’t great.

**Craig:** Just a huge error on their part and petty. And revealing. This is the problem. You reveal something about yourselves. Why in god’s name would they have done – what did they think they were going to accomplish? It’s the judgment thing that makes me – so it’s not a question of like, boo, you’re anti-writer. If they want to be anti-writer and somehow manage to be successful at the same time I guess OK. But there’s no successful strategy encased in that move. None.

**John:** Nope. None. And also it speaks to the question of who owns a meeting. And so if a meeting is set up between a writer and the studio, to my thinking is a social contract between the two of them that is not a thing that the agency owns in any meaningful way. I don’t think you can own an intangible thing. That’s the frustration to me, too, is that they felt that they controlled that meeting rather than the writer.

**Craig:** I’m sorry. It’s so arrogant. And you’re Gersh. No offense—

**[Alarm timer sounds off]**

Whoa.

**John:** I literally set a timer. That’s three minutes. We’re done. We can’t talk anything more about it.

**Craig:** That’s good. The people at Gersh are so happy. They literally got saved by the bell. [laughs]

**John:** Literally saved by the iPhone bell. Let’s get to some questions from listeners. We have not answered listener questions for a bit.

**Craig:** Somebody at Gersh was like shorten that timer. All right, listener questions. Are we doing listener questions or we doing stakes? What would you like to do first?

**John:** Well, our first listener question is about stakes so I thought we might start with this. Why don’t you take Vera’s question here?

**Craig:** Sure. Vera from Germany, welcome Vera, asks, “How do I raise the stakes in a true story? I’m involved in writing a feature film based on real events. Our producers are worried there may not be enough personal jeopardy in the story and I worry there may not be enough potential for it. The story is about young researchers who learn something of global consequence. They are ridiculed once published and their lives changed drastically after, but they didn’t know that beforehand.

“Almost all our main characters are alive today and still relatively well-known. We’re even in touch with them and they’re supportive of our project. So we can’t make their past selves look worse than they are and wouldn’t want to. They were good. How can I raise the stakes for the characters beginning early in this story?”

John, what do you think?

**John:** Well, first off, Vera, this is a fantastic question because it’s the kind of thing you’re going to face all the time. You have the extra difficulty of having real life people in there so you can’t manipulate backstories in ways that sort of get to reverse engineer what you want them to have.

But let’s talk about stakes overall, because we’ve talked about stakes in previous episodes but it’s good to have a refresher about what we mean by stakes, what development executives mean by stakes, why you hear this term used so much, particularly in features. You hear it some in TV, but you really hear it in features.

I think there’s two main questions you’re asking when you talk about stakes. First is what is the character risking by taking this action? By making a choice to do a thing what are they putting at risk? The second question is what are the consequences if this character or these characters don’t succeed? So it’s both the action that they’re taking and also the consequences of failure. How bad is the failure if they don’t succeed?

Chernobyl, of course, has remarkable stakes throughout the three episodes I’ve seen so far. Characters are faced with these kind of stakes questions all the time. Craig, anything else about the definition of stakes we want to tackle before we get into it?

**Craig:** No, it’s a very simple concept. What are you risking and what happens if we don’t succeed? It’s as simple as that.

**John:** Yeah. So you’re trying to pick the answers to those questions and to me what’s so crucial and so often missing is proportionality. You have to pick stakes that feel right for these characters, this world, this situation. Not everything can literally be life or death. Not everything is the end of the world. And so often I think especially in our blockbusters we try to make everything be the end of the world. Superhero movies especially have to sort of be saving the whole world and they probably shouldn’t be so often.

If you think about the world of the characters, it could be the end of the world to those characters. And so then you have to carefully define, you know, what is their world consisting of. Is it their social grouping? Their standing? Is it their family? Is it their dreams, their hopes, their wishes, their goals? What is at risk for them that isn’t necessarily of global consequence?

**Craig:** Yeah. We are currently in a state of stakesflation in Hollywood where everything gets upped. It’s not enough to destroy a planet, now you must destroy the galaxy. No, now you have to destroy multiple galaxies. Now you have to destroy half of everything that is alive which I assume at some point someone is going to say, “Well, we have to move that up to next time Thanos snaps his fingers it needs to be three-quarters.”

But when you think back to the first blockbuster, generally Jaws is considered to be the first blockbuster film, and the stakes in Jaws are there people on an island that are being eaten by a shark. And our heroes have to stop the shark before it eats another person. That’s it. That’s it. And it captivates to this very day because the stakes there are really not so much about random people getting chewed up, it’s about a man who has a certain sense of self and purpose and that self and purpose is being challenged to the extreme by a creature that seemingly is beyond his ability to handle. That’s stakes. It’s personal. I love it.

**John:** That’s stakes. So obviously when we talk about stakes our key focus has to be our hero, our protagonist, and what are the stakes for that character. But it’s important to remember that there should be stakes for most of these characters and they don’t have to be the same stakes. In the case of Jaws there’s the stakes of if we do this then we could hurt tourism. If we acknowledge this problem there could be issues.

I’m thinking to Chernobyl. So, we have your scientists explaining, no, if we don’t do this thing the next thing is going to blow up and it’s going to be worse. And we have another scientist who is saying if we don’t figure out exactly what happened these other reactors could blow up. But we also have government officials who are saying we can’t let this get out because if we do let this get out then there will be a panic.

Everyone has a different sense of what the stakes are and they’re taking actions that match their own understanding of what are the most important stakes.

**Craig:** Yeah. For some characters in the show the stakes are love. I want to be with the person that I love. I don’t want to abandon them, even though it puts my own life at risk. For other people the stakes are I have to keep this government together. And if I fail to then there’s going to be chaos. Right. Everybody had their different competing interests. And in those moments, for instance in Chernobyl there’s a moment in Episode 2 where Jared Harris and Stellan Skarsgård’s characters are on a helicopter and they’re approaching the power plant. And they both have stakes.

One guy is I have an order from the supreme leader of the Soviet Union. That is somebody with nearly absolute power. And I have to fulfill that because if I don’t I understand that my life and my position and my authority and everything I have is under severe threat. And the other character’s stakes are that’s going to kill us. Don’t go there. We’ll all die.

Competing stakes. Always a good thing to have.

**John:** And ultimately the helicopter pilot has to decide.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Who does he need to listen to in this moment? And he actually reverts to sort of a lower [unintelligible] hierarchy of needs to sort of get to, OK, I don’t want to die in the next two minutes and so therefore I’m not going to fly over this thing. I’m going to listen to the other person.

But I think that actually points to really the root of stakes which is needs and wants. I mean, wants are generally sort of the better way of thinking about it. But what is the character going after? And is the thing they’re going after a really primal survival kind of thing? In some movies it absolutely will be. In some movies it is life or death. It’s cliffhanger. It’s those movies where at any given moment you could die.

But for most characters in most movies it’s a little bit higher up the chain. So it’s about comfort, family, stability, self-realization, self-actualization. Their sense of identity is at stake if they don’t succeed in this venture and that’s the risk that they’re taking.

**Craig:** All these levels of things, what it comes down to is what can you make me believe. And when it comes to stakes I don’t really as a writer have to do much to make you believe at home that saving the planet from a space alien is high enough stakes. It’s just sort of baked into the scenario. Strangely, and this is something I wish our friends in the executive suites had a stronger grasp of, that reduces our interest because there isn’t much of a challenge to that question.

John, a space alien, is threatening to blow up the world, and we need you to solve it. OK. I mean, I’m on the world. What am I supposed to do otherwise? I don’t really have a huge choice there. But if I say to you, John, you have a dream of something that means a lot to you but to pursue it will put your relationship with your own family at risk. That is stakes that now I’m leaning forward in my seat and thinking, ooh.

**John:** So Craig let’s talk about another recent movie that did a great job with stakes and obviously this is a movie that had huge end of the universe kind of stakes but also had very personal stakes which was Avengers: Endgame, which I thought did a really brilliant job of blending the two. Because obviously it’s going to have these big superhero stakes. Half of civilization, half of all living things have been eliminated with a snap. And yet there were very clear personal stories that they focused on. The choices of – we see Hawkeye losing his family and sort of wanted to get his family back and so that was so important. But I thought what they did with Tony Stark and Tony Stark being reluctant to even pursue going after this solution because he didn’t want to risk this family that he’d been able to have in this intervening time. It was really smartly done.

**Craig:** Yeah. Markus and McFeely are experts at working what I would call understandable, empathizable, if that’s a term, stakes into movies where the apparent stakes are ka-boom and blech and pow, right. What they say is even something as dramatic and huge circumstantially as half of every living person dying in the universe they narrow it in. It’s like they kind of force you to tunnel into a relationship to that event through individuals.

What does this mean for me and the man I love? What does this mean for me and my brother? What does this mean for me and the sacrifices I’ve made in my own life to get to this point? All of it is – they just tunnel you into that so that the two things are enmeshed. And that is super important. I just think these broader stakes of something is going to blow up is ultimately irrelevant. There’s no Die Hard unless there is a man trying to win his wife back. It just doesn’t matter. I don’t care.

**John:** It doesn’t matter.

**Craig:** I don’t care about who is in the Nakatomi Building. I want John McClane to kind of earn some redemption and get his life back. That’s, you know, what I’m hoping for.

**John:** Yeah. And even movies that have similar kinds of plot devices the nature of the stakes is so key in why they work differently. So think about comparing the first Charlie’s Angels to a Mission: Impossible movie. They both have some of the same beats and sort of plot mechanics and sort of set pieces, but the Charlie’s Angels fundamentally like will this family be torn apart. Will they be able to save their father figure character? That’s a very different dynamic than what you see in a Mission: Impossible movie.

It gets down to those really granular details about what is the relationship between these characters. What do they really want beyond just the plot wants?

**Craig:** Yeah. And this kind of fine-tuning and understanding, this is where unfortunately we do drift out of the area of craft and into the area of instinct which isn’t really teachable. But what I would say to Vera is, in just garnering what I can from your question, Vera, it seems to me that you’re wondering if you have to make them look bad to create stakes and I’m not sure that that’s ever necessary. Those two things aren’t really connected. I think if they were good people but you understood watching it, and you may have to adjust, that they were risking something really important to them to put their research out into the world. And really important it can’t just be my job. Nobody cares. You can get another job.

It has to be how someone they love or admire looks at them. Or how it might disrupt their pursuit of somebody that they love. Or how it might affect who they think they are as a human being and what their value is. It’s got to be something I can feel in my stomach, you know? Then there are stakes. And, by the way, perfectly fine to create a movie with stakes and have a character “bet it all” and lose. That sometimes is the most interesting story at all.

**John:** Yeah. I think back to Erin Brockovich which this is based on a true life story. This character intervenes in these water poisoning situations. But it was the specificity of like what was in turmoil in her life that made it such a compelling story. And Susannah Grant had to look at all the possible stories to tell and pick the one that had real stakes for that central Erin Brockovich character. And her stakes were not the stakes of the people who were drinking the contaminated water. Her stakes are personal. They’re about her relationships. They involve her kid, her boyfriend, sort of the dynamics of her life.

So I would say look at the characters, the real life people you have in this situation. Try to mine for some interesting ways that they either fit together or that in taking the actions they are doing they’re not just disrupting their own lives or risking their own – I say lives, not their physical lives but their own status or place – but is going to have repercussions on those around them. And the degree to which they understand that, those are stakes.

**Craig:** Yeah. 100%. I think that that’s kind of what we’re dancing around here as we talk through all this. We’re really talking about character. I think sometimes this notion of stakes gets separated out by people who are analytic or – and by analytic I mean producers and executives who are trying to come up with something easy for us like, “Well what are the stakes?” And the truth is if the character is working, you’ll know what the stakes are. The character and the stakes should be embedded with each other. It should just be one in the same.

In the same way that the character and the story should be embedded with each other and be one in the same. And the dialogue and the character should be – character is the hub. Character is the hub of the wheel my friends. And stakes is just one more spoke emanating out of it. It’s all baked into character.

In the case of adapting real life, Vera, it’s OK to make changes in order to create some stakes. Sometimes you have to alter that but do it within the spirit of what you know really happened. And if in the spirit of what really happened there are no stakes at all, maybe it’s not a thing. But I suspect that there are some there.

**John:** I think there are. The last little bit I want to add on stakes is there’s a second kind of stakes which is not this overall story/character arch-y kind of stakes, but is very specific to a scene or sequence. And so an action sequence is the easiest way to think about that where if the character doesn’t succeed in this moment these are the consequences or the possible consequences. In those cases it is a little bit more craft, where you actually have to understand that the audience needs to be able to see what could go wrong or what the downfalls are of a mistake or a less than perfect performance in that moment.

When we had Chris McQuarrie on to talk about – on Episode 300 – to talk about the Mission: Impossible movies, he gets a lot into that. Which is basically how can this possibly end well. And to get the audience asking that question you have to make it clear what the jeopardy is. And sometimes as I’ve rewritten my own stuff or rewritten other people’s stuff it’s because it wasn’t clear in that moment, in that scene, what was the thing that could tip one way or the other.

So making sure that in those moments that is really clear to an audience.

**Craig:** Every scene is its own movie. And that means every scene has its own stakes. And all of that is connected back to a simple question: what is it you want? What do you want? Even if the scene is if that fiery gasoline trail hits that fuel tank then all those people are going to die, well, I want to stop that. It still has to come back to somebody wanting something. And ideally there’s somebody else saying, “No, I want it to explode.” And now we’ve got ourselves a scene. But even if the scene is I’m sitting down to tell someone that the nature of our relationship is changing there are stakes.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So it’s always there.

**John:** All right. Let’s move onto another question. This is from Daniel in Israel who writes, “I’ve been offered to write a TV pilot episode for a local production company. The thing I’m supposed to write the pilot around is essentially only a main plot point. Something someone might call an inciting incident. What I am lacking is the protagonist. Not his identity, but what he wants and what he needs in his life. What I’m trying to figure out is how to create this protagonist in light of this ‘inciting incident.” How would you construct a screenplay and its protagonist when all that you have to work with is this main plot point?”

So, a related question here really. Here Daniel is facing a situation where the plot of it, or at least the start of the plot is really clear. He’s trying to figure out who is the character to drive through this doorway into a story.

**Craig:** Great question, Daniel. And first of all, if we’re in a situation where somebody was just sitting around the house and thinking, “Oh my gosh, I have a great idea for a plot, but how do I come up with a character?” I would say you don’t have a great idea for a plot. Start with character.

But this kind of thing where somebody comes to you and here are your own stakes – there’s money. You’re trying to earn money as a writer.

**John:** There’s money, yes.

**Craig:** And they’re giving you an assignment. You have to figure it out. This happens all the time. I cannot tell you how many times I get a call where someone says, “We’ve got a script. It needs a little bit of work. Story works great. We just need characters. We need character work.” And I just think the story can’t be that great. If the characters aren’t good how is the story good?

So, Daniel, here is I guess the only practical advice I have for you is take your main plot point and ask this question: to whom would it be most interesting for this to apply? Because any random person can go into a situation and be confronted by a problem. But there are certain people who the nature of their lives and the position that they’re in and their past and what they want – they’re the best people to do this to. And typically it’s because this is the thing that will torture them the most. So, think of who that is and you may be off and running.

**John:** I agree. I think back to the How Would This Be a Movie segments we’ve done and they fall into two camps. There’s ones that have a really fascinating character and then you have to figure out like how would you actually build a story around that character. The other ones are the sort of plot machines. Oh, that is a really crazy thing that happened in the real world and you have to then approach it with like, OK, who is the character that should really be driving that story. So, it might be a real life event and there’s myriad characters around it, but you have to figure out whose point of view is actually the interesting point of view.

And I think Craig nailed it. It’s the character for whom the story is especially suited. Either because they are perfect for it, like they are the one person who could be the expert in the situation, or more often and more interestingly the person who is the least well-equipped to be doing this and is out of their element. And that is going to give you more conflict, more comedy if you’re going for comedy. It’s going to be the person who is relatable to the audience because they’re probably a good proxy for the audience in that they don’t have the information or the expertise to be grappling with this situation.

**Craig:** Yeah. Let’s call it the A side of things. In movies we talk about the A side and the B side. It’s sort of like an editorial term. Like the stuff that happens before, the stuff that happens after. So that’s the A side of it. And then the B side of it is for whom would the resolution of this plot point be the most interesting and satisfying? Think about it from forward and backward and you just might have yourself a solution there.

All right, let’s move along to Alex from New York, shall we?

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** All right. Alice writes, “I’m in a script writing class and I’m trying to pitch a story where there is no three-act structure. My professor responded by saying that for this class we can only make something that follows the structure. She then pulled out a book with the title How to Write a Great Screenplay.” [laughs]

“And said our script had to contain the six key moments. Of course there are many great movies that follow the three-act structure, but I also know that many of my favorite movies don’t – Boyhood, Nashville, A Serious Man come to mind. I guess my question is do you need a three-act structure to write a great movie or is this a sign that I should drop out of this overpriced school?” [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] I love people who answer their own questions. Obviously the answer Alice is you’re not in a very good screenwriting program. But I want to sort of move past that moment to talk about this idea of how you teach writing. Because it occurred to me this last week, my daughter for her English class has to write these five-paragraph essays. And Craig you remember these five-paragraph essays.

**Craig:** I sure do.

**John:** They have to have–

**Craig:** Thesis.

**John:** The thesis and then you have to–

**Craig:** The examples.

**John:** Exactly. Each paragraph has to be about a different thing of those things and has to summarize and have the evidence within them and then a conclusion. And I find it just a torturous form. And I want to push back against it, and yet I do feel like it’s important that she learn how to write this ridiculous form now so that she understands what it is and will hopefully never have to write it quite the same way again.

A thesis is important. A thesis, you know, a central idea behind which all of your essay hangs together – that’s important. And for screenplays an understanding of a three-act structure I think is important. That sense that movies do have beginnings, middles, and ends. And there is a natural flow through which you move through story.

But I don’t want to be as an adult be forced to pay money to take a class where someone holds up a terrible screenwriting book and says that you have to follow this template.

**Craig:** Someone has written a book How to Write a Great Screenplay. I’m going to go out on a limb here. Because I have not heard of this book. Therefore my conclusion, this is just supposition, is that the individual who has written the book How to Write a Great Screenplay has not written a great screenplay. What else do you need to know?

Now, when it comes to surviving classes and things like that, you can take any movie and slap a three-act structure on it. If you put a gun in my mouth and say, A Serious Man, divvy that up into three acts. I’ll do it for you. No problem.

**John:** Totally. Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s also a sign that it’s useless. It is a very fundamental thing. It’s a little bit like in math class when you were moving ahead and your teacher said, “No, sorry. You need to show all your work. You need to show me the 15 plus 24 equals, carry, the whole thing.” Can’t I just do it in my head? “No.” OK, fine. So that’s what it is. It’s a little remedial.

Our script had to contain the six key moments. Hey, Alice from New York, I don’t know what those are. John, do you know what those are?

**John:** I don’t know what they are.

**Craig:** Well, we’re doing all right. [laughs] You got Aladdin out. I got Chernobyl running. Things are going OK. Somehow we made it without not only reading How to Write a Great Screenplay. We’ve never even heard of it.

**John:** So, here’s what I will try to defend about this idea about teaching people this template-y thing. if the teacher were requiring you to just do an outline, like a one or two-page outline that talked about your story in those beats or like come up with a new story and make it fit those beats, that I could see being a valuable exercise because it might get you to think about whatever these elements are I suspect they are, you know, what is that transition between the first act and second act, which real life screenwriters do talk about. Where you’re really – you’re not in Kansas anymore moment. Where a character has crossed a threshold into a new part of the story. That does tend to happen in most places.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** One of these other elements could be kind of a reversal where the thing that looks like it was close is now actually much further away. That things have gotten much worse. That is probably a meaningful beat. And so if it was an outline thing, but to make you write and entire 100-page screenplay following this template I don’t think is a fair thing to ask.

**Craig:** No. Perfectly fine to suggest that this is how beginners can learn. This is an intro to screenwriting. But if somebody like you says, “Listen, as a paying customer of this institution I would like to attempt to do it this way.” Why in god’s name would they tell you no? Listen, do it that way. And if it stinks, and by the way, higher probability it will stink, because you’re trying something – you’re doing like a degree of difficulty dive here that’s different than the other dives – then people will tell you it stunk and you’ll learn something and you’ll move on. It doesn’t mean that three acts are going to save you from stinking, nor does it mean that not three acts condemns you to stinking. It’s just part of the learning process.

But I would say to your professor stop that. Just cut it out. That’s just bizarrely pedantic.

**John:** I agree. Chris writes, “I recently swapped scripts with a writer friend. Instead of offering me story notes he called out formatting ‘errors’ in my first couple pages such as how I bold slug lines, reference a song, italicize dialogue for emphasis instead of underlining, etc. I explained how I was under the impression that all these things were stylistic choices rather than hard and fast rules. That a writer should use anything to better paint a movie in the reader’s mind.

“As an underwriter he argued that script formatting must be much tighter so as not to give anyone reading it a reason to throw it away. Is this true or is my friend simply being overly nitpicky on things that are really a writer’s choice? I’ve read dozens of screenplays at this point and feel no two really format exactly the same way.”

Craig, where are you at?

**Craig:** This is guy is swapping with his friend. You know who likes that?

**John:** That guy, yes. That guy.

**Craig:** Sexy Craig. So we’re talking about swapping, huh Chris? You going to swap?

**John:** Apparently they’re talking.

**Craig:** Get out of here, Sexy Craig. You can’t answer this question. Angry Craig can answer this question. Umbrage Craig is here. How many times do we have to kill this? This zombie won’t – we shoot it in the brain. We cut off its head. We light its heart on fire. What do we need to do to stop this from happening, John? I’m at my wit’s end. What do we do?

**John:** I don’t know. So I feel like a lot of people do listen to the show, but I’m also aware when people like Chris writes in that not everyone listens to the show.

**Craig:** Wait, what?

**John:** There are a few people who don’t listen to the show, although I’ll say that I had some meetings this past week and I was just surprised like folks who aren’t writers who listen to the show. So shout out to those folks who are not writers who listen to the show.

But, yeah, I don’t know how we’re going to win them over. I think all we can hope to do is to our listeners remind them that, listen, the standard screenplay formatting is helpful. It’s helpful because it creates an expectation about how stuff is supposed to look and if you go wildly off of it we are going to wonder does this person really know what they’re doing. Even as we do the Three Page Challenges when we see things that are like that’s not how it’s done we will comment on that because it is useful because it can slow a reader. It gives a reader an excuse for putting it aside.

I don’t think that’s what you were doing, Chris. The things you were singling out are reasonable choices. Some bold slug lines. I like to bold slug lines. I didn’t always, but now I do. So I use italics fairly liberally. It’s OK.

I think we just need to always remind folks that the standards are there because they’re helpful and they’re sort of standard but they’re not hard fast rules. And anyone who tells you otherwise probably doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just stop giving your friends scripts. They’re useless. Sorry. Your friend is useless. I don’t know how else to put it. I mean–

**John:** Also, your friend is useless because your friend did not give you constructive notes about the actual story.

**Craig:** Exactly. Correct. All they did was demand that you conform to a system that they insist is real but I can assure you is utter nonsense. Nonsense. That’s what they did. You were looking for advice on the story, the characters, the theme, the dialogue, and they came back and said here are a bunch of things you’re doing that are incorrect factually.

And the only person that was doing something factually incorrect is your friend, who maybe shouldn’t be your friend anymore. Because, I’m sorry, I bold slug lines. And like you, John, used to not bold slug lines. I reference songs all the time. I italicize dialogue for emphasis all the time. I also underline. I use We See. I do all these stupid things.

And your friend, I guarantee you, is going to say, “By the way I heard on Scriptnotes that they were bagging on me, but you know what? They only say that because they’re successful. But if you’re not them then…” this is how he sounds by the way. “And then you’re going to send your script to readers. They’re going to throw it out. If they see that you italicize dialogue they’re going to throw it out.”

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this. And all I can say is no. No, I’ve been doing it this way since I began when I was nobody. Nobody cared. You know what they cared about? Oh my god, I like a script finally. This month of just sifting through one desperate, soul-crushing failure of a screenplay after another and finally something showed up that was, I don’t know, at least mediocre. It made their day. [laughs] That’s all they care about it. That’s it. They don’t care about the rest of this. For the love of god.

**John:** So I’ll say if people don’t trust my authority as a screenwriter on this, let me go back to 20 years to when I was a professional reader. My job was to read screenplays. And I would read two a day and I would write up coverage on them. So I read 200 screenplays. And it was my job to be that reader who passed things up or said no to things. And not once – not once in 200 scripts – did I ever single out for formatting. Oh, it’s a really good story but warning executives it’s not formatted exactly the way you’d want.

No one cares about that. If you’ve never seen coverage – it’s only pedants who say this.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes. Yes. Oh, you know what? John, that – the guy that I was just listening to there, I’m going to call that, that’s Victory John.

**John:** Victory John.

**Craig:** Victory John. He knows when he walks into a room victory is assured. Victory John was great there. Nice work Victory John.

**John:** Done.

**Craig:** Chris, get rid of your friend.

**John:** Craig, let’s take one last question. Can you read Garrett for us?

**Craig:** Absolutely. Garrett asks, oh god, do we have to do this one?

**John:** I think we can – it actually goes into an interesting place.

**Craig:** Let’s do it. Fine. Garrett asks, “So many fans are furious about the conclusion of Game of Thrones. I am nowhere near dealing with this problem personally, but how do writers surprise insatiate rabid fans who spend all their time figuring out where a series or movie will go? It seems as though super fans will be disappointed whether the ending is too predictable or completely out of left field.”

All right, John, dig in.

**John:** Garrett, I think you are correct. Again, I like people who ask a question and then answer the question within their question. There was no way to land that plane that would keep everybody happy. Some people were really upset by how it ended. Some people signed a petition to redo the whole season. That ain’t helpful. That’s not going to happen.

We’re in this weird time where a fan’s ownership of a piece of material and sort of their sense that the culture belongs to them is really challenging and somewhat problematic. As a person who loves the show I was excited to see the show do what the show wanted to do. And I was excited that the creators got to do what they wanted to do. But that’s not going to be to everyone’s taste.

Craig, how do you resolve Garrett’s question?

**Craig:** I think that the shocking part of it all is that it is impossible to get that angry about an episode of television unless you love that episode or that series. You love it. And the only way you can love it is if the people who made that episode made what you love.

This isn’t a case where some other showrunner came along and took it over and everybody goes, nah, they don’t have the magic. That’s fine. I get that. But in this case Dan and Dave who made this thing you loved, not for one episode or one season, but for years, and who gave up years, a decade of their life, while their children were being born and raised, moving back and forth between Los Angeles and Ireland over and over and over. Doing all of these things and throwing their heart and soul into all of this and keeping a massive cast together and a storyline that involved god knows how many characters. I wish I could impress upon people how many decisions are required to make one episode of television. It is insane.

And they did it into the 70s of episodes of television and they did it in the highest level. And the very same creative ambition and bravery that led them to this material in the first place and allowed them to do it in such a remarkable way in the first place is the very same creative bravery and ambition that led them to deliver an ending that they thought was right.

And if you don’t like it, that’s OK.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** But why – the part that blows my mind, and this is where I agree with you Garrett, it’s a huge problem – is why people would suddenly say things like they’re bad writers. How dare you. How dare you. Not on the level of being insulting to Dan to Dave. They’re geniuses and they’re doing just fine. How dare you insult logic in such a crass and outrageous manner. To say that they are bad writers because they didn’t write a good episode of a show we love because they’re good writers.

I mean, get help. Listen, I get it. You can be super angry in an episode. I’ve seen episodes of things of shows that I love where I watch the episode and said I don’t like this. I don’t like the choices they made. But what I would never do is say because they’re bad writers.

I’m sorry, no one is going to bat 1,000. How about be happy for the good times and the joy they brought you, which is a decade of joy. Can’t we celebrate that? It just bums me out.

**John:** I don’t know who proposed this, but someone was pitching that HBO should film a reality show, sort of like a Project Greenlight, where they bring together eight of the biggest petition signers about wanting to do a new season and get them all together to write a new final season. And just film the whole thing.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** And what that process is like. Because that would be–

**Craig:** What a cruel, cruel joke to play.

**John:** That would be pretty amazing.

**Craig:** And I do. I see things where people say, “I figured it out. Here’s what they should have done.” And they’ll stick it somewhere and then people go like, “Yeah, amazing.” And I’m reading and I’m like that would have been the stupidest, lamest, who cares episode of nonsense in history.

Remember, again, they are somewhat victims of their own success. This is a show where people would spend a lot of time and energy trying to convince each other that Bran was really the Night King. And that level of engagement is amazing. You don’t get to it if the people making the show haven’t done an incredible job. And they did for so long. And to turn your back on them because you didn’t like the last – well, they betrayed us. No. No, you betrayed them. You betrayed them. You bought into that show. You loved it. You cared about it. You told them how great they were. Because they were. And then the minute they do something that’s slightly a – I mean, oh my god, people lost their minds because Jon Snow didn’t hug his dog, sorry, direwolf. Well, guess what? He does later.

And then I hope people go, oh, oh, if he had hugged him there then this hug wouldn’t have meant as much. Yes. Have a little faith.

**John:** That’s probably true.

**Craig:** Ugh.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I’d probably [cut] myself – I’m going to get petitions now to have my head chopped off. I don’t care.

**John:** Back in Episode 296 I sat down with Damon Lindelof. So we talked through Lost.

**Craig:** Lost. Sure.

**John:** We also talked through The Leftovers. And interesting to compare the response to those two endings because they’re both kind of big puzzle box shows and people were incredibly frustrated by the ending of Lost. People seemed to generally love the ending of The Leftovers. And I do wonder if some of it was expectation management. I felt like on The Leftovers Damon did a very good job from season one saying do not expect that you are going to have one answer that will completely resolve everything about what happened and why it happened. That will not come. And I think that softened the – conditioned things a little bit better. And so that may be one of the things that showrunners unfortunately now have to think about is not only how do I get this plane up in the air but how do I land this plane in a way that is going to – basically how do I tell everybody right while the plane is going up where I expect to land the plane and condition them for what they’re going to be getting into.

**Craig:** It’s hard to stop, especially when the joy of something is in the process of it. I mean, I’m a Game of Thrones fan. I’ve seen every minute of every episode of Game of Thrones. Including every minute of an episode that no one else has ever seen. And I’ve loved the journey. And to me the joy was the process. It was the unfolding of this story over time and the collision of characters and things.

Ending is essentially counter to the purpose of the entire venture. So, of course people are going to be a bit confused or put off by some aspects of it because it goes against the DNA of what that show is. That show, the joy of it, is in that it doesn’t end. The world gets bigger and crazier and wilder as things smash together and the stakes grow higher. That’s the joy.

So, I mean, guys, it’s almost as if you would have preferred that, I don’t know, a piano had fallen on them and there was no final season. Is that what you really want? I shouldn’t have asked that question. Now there’s going to be a petition to drop a piano on them.

**John:** So, I would say if you are considering writing into me and Craig and telling us why we’re wrong, I would urge you to first listen to Episode 235. That is the one where Benioff and Weiss came on our show at our benefit for Hollywood Heart. They were gracious to fill in for Lawrence Kasdan when he could not make it. And they talked about the making of Game of Thrones and Craig’s involvement in that early pilot process. And how this is mostly Craig’s fault.

**Craig:** Like most things.

**John:** Actually, you’re somewhat to blame, Craig. Because if you had not intervened when you had intervened maybe Game of Thrones wouldn’t have become a thing and then we wouldn’t have been frustrated by the events of the end of the last season.

**Craig:** That’s such a – you know what, John? There you go. You want to save yourself disappointment folks, stop watching things. Stop falling in love with things. Stop opening your heart to things because it’s much better to have never loved than to have loved and lost. Is that what you are saying? I’m sorry. No one can deliver it perfectly. And if you point me to something and say, “Well they did it perfectly,” I’m going to say to you no they didn’t. Because they didn’t. There’s no way to do it perfectly. You just do it.

And years later people will come – I swear to you people will come back to this years later and say, “Well actually, here’s a think piece about why it’s brilliant.” That’s just how our culture works. Inevitably.

**John:** Yep. Those are the stakes of making a high stakes show.

**Craig:** Oh wow. Segue Man, that’s beautiful.

**John:** Got to bring it all back around. It’s time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a book I read this last week which I really enjoyed. It’s by Ryan North. It’s called How to Invent Everything. And the premise of the book is that you are a time traveler, whose rental time travel machine, has broken and this is the manual that comes in the little machine. And so, OK, you’re stranded in the past. Here’s how you have to invent all the things that get you back up to modern civilization.

So it goes down from basics of agriculture to metalsmithing to inventing logic. It’s just a very comprehensive guide to how you would get back up to as close as you can do modern day civilization if you were to be stranded in prehistoric times.

**Craig:** Before being eaten.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** That is a very smart idea for a book. I like that. My One Cool Thing is also some reading material, but as you know big puzzle buy over here. So there’s a magazine. It’s an online magazine called PANDA Magazine which is short for P and A which is short for Puzzles and Answers. It is published by a gentleman named Foggy Brume. That is his real name.

**John:** I would not buy that as a character’s name. No–

**Craig:** It’s his real name.

**John:** I reject the premise of Foggy Brume.

**Craig:** Foggy Brume. Very nice guy. I’ve had the joy of puzzling with him myself a few times. And he puts out a monthly edition. And I think this is true frequently he does these big puzzle boats once a year where it’s like a big mega puzzle to do. And then each issue has a little sort of mini mega puzzle where you solve, in this case in this month’s issue there are 12 puzzles that are difficult and each one gives you an answer that you plug into one big puzzle to get a big answer. PANDAMagazine.com is where you can find this if you’re big into that sort of thing. It’s a good challenge.

Each magazine comes with a whole bunch of puzzles where he provides the answers so you’re not miserable. And then there are some that are more of like a contest where he will eventually publish the answers once the submission date comes and goes. So, PANDA Magazine. Foggy Brume. A good subscription for the puzzler in your life.

**John:** I love it. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. Edited by Matthew Chilelli who also wrote our outro this week in the style of Chernobyl.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** Who did your Chernobyl music? It’s a woman with a hard to pronounce name.

**Craig:** So her name is Hildur, well I’m going to pronounce it like an American. She is Icelandic. So the cheap pronunciation is Hildur Gudnadottir. In fact it is like Gudnadottir. I can’t do it because I’m not Icelandic and I think Icelandic is the hardest language in the world to learn and speak or something. It’s hard.

She is brilliant. You’re also going to be able to hear her work in Todd Phillips upcoming movie Joker, starring Joaquin Phoenix.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** So she’s amazing. And, good news, I believe that – so HBO has confirmed they are releasing her original soundtrack for Chernobyl for download and other versions of it. And I think it’s coming May 31. I think that’s when it will be available. I believe given the quality of the work she did on Chernobyl that that original soundtrack, that original score, is going to become a staple in editing bays.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** It’s going to be one of those temp scores that’s going to confound other composers for years to come I hope. Because it’s unique.

**John:** Nice. If you have an outro you’d like us to play you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. They go up about a week after the episode has aired.

Some folks have started to do recaps and discussion on Reddit so you can head over there and see what people are talking about for this episode.

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

You may also want to check out the Scriptnotes Listener’s Guide at johnaugust.com/guide to see which episodes listeners recommend most.

Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. See you next time.

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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([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_402_how_do_you_like_your_stakes.mp3).

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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 401 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast, a brand new feature. We asked you to record your brief pitches for movies and series. Today we’re going to listen to five of these and share our honest first impressions. We’re also going to talk about a development in the agency negotiations. And my most pressing question about Chernobyl.

But first we have to promote our live show which is coming June 13. It’s a Thursday night at the Ace Hotel. It is a benefit for Hollywood Heart, which is a fantastic charity. We can now announce two of our guests. Craig, who are two of our guests?

**Craig:** And this is going to dislodge quite a few tickets. I mean, I feel like people are going to start buying. So, number one–

**John:** Well, people have started buying. I think the rush on the box office will begin right now.

**Craig:** Correct. The Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts will begin right now. Our first guest that we can announce is Alec Berg, showrunner of Silicon Valley and showrunner and co-creator of Barry. Terrific show that I think is the most critically acclaimed show on television, of all shows.

**John:** After Chernobyl maybe.

**Craig:** No, no. No. New York Times did not like Chernobyl.

**John:** Oh, I’m sorry.

**Craig:** No, no, I can’t get The New York Times to like anything I do.

**John:** Ah, Craig, I’m sorry. I had no idea.

**Craig:** Well, listen, we’re doing really well. Don’t get me wrong. We’re like in the 90s, which for me is like in the billions because of where I’m from.

**John:** The logarithmic scale of Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** The New York Times review was bad. Not bad in the sense of they didn’t like the show, but bad in the sense that it was just a bad review. It was poorly written. I thought it was stupid. I’m not helping–

**John:** Let’s get back on topic. Let’s talk about how great it is that Alec Berg is going to be joining us on the show.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** And I already have started writing questions for him because I watched this season of Barry and I have so many questions. Not even like plot spoiler questions, but how do you in a writers’ room figure out how you’re going to do that thing. So I’m excited to talk with him.

**Craig:** He’s a great person to ask those questions for because he does have one of those remarkable clockwork minds. And then we have Rob McElhenney, showrunner of longest running sitcom in history, It’s Always Sunny, and a new Apple show that is going to be out at some point. And, by the way, you know who is – I mean, I can’t talk about a lot of the actors that are on the show, but it’s a great cast. But do you know who is number 16 on the call sheet?

**John:** Craig is it you?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Ah, Craig. So not only are you making television shows, you’re now starring in television shows.

**Craig:** Just so people know, like on the call sheet every day there’s a list of all the actors that are in it. And number one on the call sheet means you’re the star of the show. And then it kind of goes down from there. On this show number 16 is really low. I’m barely in it. But, still, I’m in it. But I’m in it.

**John:** That’s going to be amazing.

**Craig:** And Rob is a great, great guest. A terrific guy to have on the show.

**John:** So he was actually on a previous one of these live shows that I was not at. So, you and Dana Fox hosted a show where he was a guest. I missed that. So this will actually be my first time meeting him. I’ve talked with him on the phone before, but this will be my first time asking him questions about all the stuff he’s working on.

So, we have two showrunners who are coming on. We have more guests that will be announced soon.

**Craig:** Oh yes.

**John:** I think they will fit along that same thing, but we don’t want to tease too much. So you should get your tickets now. There’s a link in the show notes for where you can get your tickets to this big event. Thursday, June 13, at the Ace Hotel here in Los Angeles. There will be games. There will be giveaways. You should absolutely come.

**Craig:** And, again, benefits Hollywood Heart which is a wonderful charity that our friend John Gatins is involved with and it helps kids who are at risk and kids with HIV. It’s a great thing. Come on, I mean, what else do we have to say? Alec Berg. Rob McElhenney. Us. Helping people. And more guests to come. Buy your tickets, folks.

**John:** You should buy your tickets. You should also buy t-shirts. T-shirts are up for sale now. They don’t kind of go down at any point. This isn’t one of those things where they’re limited times. You can buy them kind of whenever you want to buy them, but you should buy them now so you can wear them to the live show. These are the sort of VHS-inspired ones. They go all the way back to when Scriptnotes was distributed by tape, so sort of underground rings that would copy tapes and put them around.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** So really it’s a celebration of the origins of Scriptnotes after 400 episodes.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’ve always been in our late 40s.

**John:** It’s remarkable how that works.

**Craig:** We’ve always been the caretaker. Yeah, that’s my favorite shirt by the way. I love that shirt design.

**John:** Last week on the show we were joined by Chris McQuarrie and we talked through movies that don’t get made anymore, movie genres that don’t get made anymore. And Ryan Smith tweeted at me. He said, “Hey guys, great episode. Loved the discussion. For the ‘sword and sandals’ or Christ figure against Rome features would it be a stretch to say we still make them, but just in the form of Star Wars?”

**Craig:** Sort of. I mean, there’s definitely elements of that in Star Wars, but Star Wars also has elements of pirate movies. Star Wars has elements of war movies. Star Wars has elements of, yeah, I mean it sort of meshes together lots of different things. But no question, I mean, if you watch – let’s go back to the original first Star Wars in 1977, you know, and you have a benign figure sacrificing himself to save others and so on and so forth.

**John:** Yeah, I mean, like a Tatooine and sort of like, you know, that feels like a desert world. It feels very much like that kind of sword and sandals kind of place that he’s in. So movies four and seven kind of feel that way to me. But also we have the pod races in the prequels. And you don’t have those pod races without the chariot races.

**Craig:** That’s right. Exactly. That’s basically Ben-Hur via CGI. And but I think it’s also fair to say that we’re going to see the Christ story in everything. I mean, it’s across all genres. Animated movies are that frequently.

**John:** Now, Craig, you often say that you root for the Empire in these movies. So, do you also root for Rome in the Christ figure against Rome stories?

**Craig:** Well, you know, I mean, Rome is holding things together.

**John:** They are holding things together. They are holding back the chaos.

**Craig:** The question is not how evil is Rome. The question is how evil would the replacement for Rome be. And we kind of know because after the collapse of Rome you have the darkest period in western history. It’s just a brutal ongoing disaster the dark ages. Disease. Superstition. Torture. Murder. Just unpleasantries.

**John:** Yeah. And important knowledge was forgotten. The book I’m going to get to as a recommendation later on, like they figured out how to make concrete and then they forgot. They forgot the recipe for concrete.

**Craig:** Just literally forgot.

**John:** So there were people who were living in structures that they could no longer build, which is just a fascinating thing to think about.

**Craig:** I feel like sometimes that’s where we are now.

**John:** Ah.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** We want to make sure that institutional knowledge is not lost.

**Craig:** Yeah, man.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think the Internet helps, but it doesn’t solve all of the problems.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** That’s why we keep the first 400 episodes of Scriptnotes always available for people to download through the app or to download seasons. We used to sell the USB drives. We want to make sure the institutional knowledge of Scriptnotes continues on.

**Craig:** Of course. And have we sent the USB drives over to the seed bank? I can’t remember if we did that or not?

**John:** So they’re stored in the vault. Unfortunately the vault flooded, but it’s going to work out somehow. Speaking of longevity and things going on a long time.

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** So we’re recording this on Friday. So, I.M. Pei, the renowned architect, passed away as we’re recording. And Herman Wouk, The Winds of War. So I.M. Pei was 102. Wouk was 103.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** You know what? It’s sad that talented people have died, but come on, when you live past the century mark that’s awesome.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** I want to live for at least 100 years.

**Craig:** Of course you do. And, oh, well you obviously will live until whenever your parts become obsolete and not replaceable. But I have to say every time someone famous dies now whatever twinge of sadness I have of their passing and the fact that we don’t have them anymore is quickly eclipsed by a larger twinge of sadness that they won’t get to see our current president not be president anymore.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They’re not going to see that. And I’m so bummed out. I don’t want to die before I see that.

**John:** Yeah. You want to go out at a good place, a good time.

**Craig:** And I don’t mind being political. I don’t care. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Craig doesn’t mind being political? I can’t believe it.

**Craig:** You know what? I’m going to speak my mind. How about that?

**John:** I would say when my dad passed away, this was when I was in college, I was of course sad to lose my father but in the years past that point I would say the thing that kind of makes me saddest when I think back about him is that he didn’t get to see sort of what the Internet became. Because he was involved because he was an engineer at AT&T. So he was involved in the very early stages of what became the Internet. And he would just be blown away by what sort of what it became and what it grew into. And so those are the conversations I miss having with him are mostly about the things that happened, how the world changed, and how excited he would be about the stuff that came.

**Craig:** I just had a vision of you waking up at night and there is the ghost of your father. And he’s looking at your phone, scrolling through the Internet. And then he just turns to you with a shocked, devastated look, and says, “John, it’s all porn.”

**John:** Ha!

**Craig:** It’s all porn.

**John:** Yeah. The Internet is made for that.

**Craig:** Internet is for porn.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s get onto our other topics. So, this past week I had two videos out. I had a video that was put out by the WGA about the Start Button. So it’s a little animated video. Matthew Chilelli did the music for it. Of course, because Matthew Chilelli is a genius.

I also recorded a video with Michele Mulroney where we talked about screenwriter issues. It looks like our audition tape for hosting the KCLM morning news because we’re seated side-by-side. It was my first time using a teleprompter. Teleprompters are fantastic. I love Teleprompters.

Even those two things were not the biggest news of the week, because on Thursday evening it was announced that Verve had signed onto an agreement with the WGA. Verve became the largest agency to sign an agreement with the WGA. So, folks who want to be represented by Verve can be represented by Verve again.

So the WGA in their statement said that, I always go back to what the WGA officially said so I don’t speak out of turn, but in their official statement said, “WGA and Verve representatives first met face-to-face on April 30 and thereafter exchanged counter proposals. The back and forth with Verve was the most substantive negotiation with an agency we’ve had to date.”

And that’s true. From my perspective, the ability to actually talk through specific things was great. And that’s been one of the things I’ve enjoyed most about this part of the process is to really get down to fine details on stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I would put this in the category of not-insignificant. Because Verve is a legitimate agency that represents quite a few writers, what like 300 WGA members? That’s a lot. They are not part of the ATA, so that’s the one thing that I think a lot of people didn’t realize. This wasn’t a case where the WGA had a strategy of splitting off an ATA company and succeeded. But nonetheless–

**John:** Yeah, one small agency which was already an ATA member had split off, but it’s not something you’d heard of.

**Craig:** Yeah. So we’ll put that in the is-insignificant category. So, the other significant victory here is that there is proof of life in that at the very least even on the most entrenched people on both sides of this fight between the Writers Guild and the ATA there is evidence that an agreement is possible. Negotiation is possible. And so that’s promising.

**John:** Yeah. Well let’s talk about what is different between the original code of conduct, so we can put a link into so people can read it, but the basic things that are different from what other folks had signed before is that it’s a mutual agreement. So it’s not just here’s the code, take it or leave it. It’s an agreement that both parties are signing. Both parties have the right to open and renegotiate this agreement. It clarifies that agencies can represent producers who do not employ writers, which was a real question.

It gets around some of the reporting onus by just saying that agencies can copy the WGA on invoices and request for payments. So the WGA sees those records but they don’t have to file a whole separate listing of things. And it changes – it backs off on how often agencies have to list which films they are representing for sales and other stuff. So they don’t have to do it as often. So it backs off on some of their reporting requirements. Those are the big things that the WGA sort of specified or are different in this code of conduct.

**Craig:** Yeah. Now, so good news and bad news, right? So the good news is that the WGA was able to negotiate this with Verve and that, OK, the WGA was clearly willing to meet them halfway on certain things. Bad news is none of those things are the big issues that we have with the ATA. So one of the reasons that Verve was a good candidate for this is that they don’t do packaging. And they don’t have their own production company the way that say William Morris Endeavor does.

**John:** Let’s be clear on one thing. Verve has traditionally done TV packaging. And so even in Verve’s statement they said like this doesn’t mean that we are against TV packaging. And sort of saying like – which I took to mean like if the ultimate agreement that’s reached says that TV packaging is OK we want to be able to go back and do it.

**Craig:** Right. OK, fair enough. It wasn’t a large part of their business.

**John:** It wasn’t a big part of their business.

**Craig:** But that makes total sense. And I think one thing that was really interesting and smart by the WGA for sure, although to give into at the very least, although it was surely something that Verve insisted on, was a most favored nations’ clause.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Essentially if you go make a deal with the ATA that is more favorable than the one you made with us, which is in the eventuality of the deal almost certain, that Verve gets lifted up to that as well. And that’s really important because it provides a relief valve. If that clause isn’t there the problem is then there is nowhere to go for negotiation between the WGA and the ATA. Because what you can’t do is then go and undercut what you just did with Verve. It makes no sense essentially.

**John:** Well, it also gets rid of the first mover problem where you don’t want to be the first person to sign on because you’re worried that people later on are going to get better deals. So you know you’re going to get the best deal ultimately.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So I think that’s an important thing. And that truly was in earlier versions of the code of conduct. So the people who signed that earlier thing, they can take this deal if they prefer this deal.

**Craig:** Great. So that’s great. That’s all good news.

**John:** But let’s talk about what’s not in there. So clearly a decision on what TV packaging looks like, this agreement says you cannot do TV packaging. You can’t collect fees on that. And you cannot be a producer. And so those are two big things that the big four agencies are going to really be focused on.

**Craig:** Correct. I mean, that is – those two things are where the battle lines are drawn. I think both sides can easily make more out of some other issues if they want. But the big ones, as you just said, packaging fees and agency-owned production. So, that still needs to be worked out if it can be worked out. And we are now I believe we have four weeks of this behind us, correct?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** OK. So, you know, let me just say the following. I’ll be brief about it. But I’m disappointed. I’m disappointed in general. Because this is not what I wanted. When I supported this movement from the start and we had Chris Keyser on and I was pretty – I think I was pretty demonstrative as I normally am. I believe that there are real issues that make the way the agencies conduct their packaging fee business and their producing business untenable as they are moving forward. We cannot continue in that way. And I think excellent points have been made why.

I think, frankly, that most of the people in charge of those big four companies agree. I think they are also aware that the way it’s been going cannot continue as is. It has to change. OK. This is what has been so disappointing to me. For four weeks essentially nothing has happened because there has been a breakdown in communication. And I know that both sides essentially are pointing fingers at each other and saying you’re why. But I’m a member of the Writers Guild. I’m not a member of the ATA. So I’m going to talk about the Writers Guild.

I am confused and a bit exasperated by our strategy of not talking to them. I don’t think that talking to somebody is a capitulation, nor do I think it’s a sign of weakness. I don’t know how much more leverage we could possibly have. Because in this situation we have 100% leverage as far as I’m concerned. If we choose to not we don’t have to ever enfranchise them again. With that in mind, a lot of people – way more than 300 – thousands of writers, including myself, would very much like to get back to the relationships that were functioning if not perfectly, fairly well, and in a way that was good enough to say let us improve this and salvage this.

So, what I’m urging is that we figure out how to get back into a room that makes sense. Because the room we were in clearly didn’t make sense. Whether it’s their fault or our fault the problem is all either side heard was offense and hurt and anger. Neither side seemed to understand what the other side was doing. All intentions appear to have either been poorly relayed or poorly heard. So, we need to figure out something.

I don’t mind a situation where best efforts lead to a failure. I am growing angry by the fact that we are not engaging actively in figuring out how to find a way to talk to the other side so that we can try and get something that works for everybody. And we don’t have to take it. That’s the thing. If in our hearts of hearts we’re like, look, this is 100% of what we want and we’re not willing to settle for less than 98% of it, fine. But try. You know, to not be in a room for four weeks because, I don’t know, there’s some theory that we can get 150 or 200 or 4,000% by waiting another four weeks doesn’t make any sense.

And there’s a pressure here and the pressure I will relay is, as always, I will speak on behalf of feature writers. So in our last negotiation – I’m sorry, I’m monologuing but it will be over soon – in our last negotiation I swore to myself, Craig, you’re not going to do this again. You’re not going to just willingly go along with the guild as they put all of the membership at risk and leverage us and our work to get a better deal for one part of the membership, TV writers. You’re not going to do it again because feature writers are the ones that are really getting kicked in the teeth every single day. And they’re the ones who are losing money year by year and they’re the ones whose employment is going down year by year. Ugh. Don’t do it anymore. And yet I fell into the trap and did it again because this entire agency battle, this entire agency battle, hinges on these two major issues and really both of them impact television far more than features. Far more.

So there are a lot of feature writers who once again are being told by their union you’re firing your agent and also maybe – maybe – you can get them back if we can figure out something that’s better for TV writers. And the longer this goes on the more tragic I find that.

So, in short, I remain committed to the goal, which is to improve a system that cannot continue as it used to be, right? So the status quo, what was before, unacceptable. We’re not going back to that, no matter what. But we don’t have to. That’s number one.

Number two, I want us to actually now do the work to get there. Whatever it takes, do the work. If we can’t get there, at least we tried. And then that’s on them. But if we’re holding our breath I just don’t see the point.

Rant over.

**John:** I know. We kept you in a single that whole time. You were in a tight single. You maintained for your whole monologue.

So, obviously I’m on the negotiating committee so I can’t talk about some things and I can’t talk about strategies and tactics and other stuff. I’m a little bit disadvantaged in responding to some of it.

**Craig:** Acknowledged.

**John:** But what I will say is that as a screenwriter I feel that the producing function of all this is a thing that keeps me up at night. And it kept me up at the very start of this all. The idea that five years, 10 years, 20 years down the road if we don’t address this now we’ll be kicking ourselves because that move from being a client to an employee is devastating. We cannot let that happen.

And I hear you when you say that it’s more a factor for TV than for features. I don’t think the distinction between TV and features is especially meaningful five, 10 years, 20 years down the road. I think there will still be two-hour things written, but I think if we don’t address this producing function now we’re going to see these same places producing features or essentially forcing themselves onto things that should be studio features because they can. So those are my big concerns.

**Craig:** I hear you.

**John:** If we don’t address this producing function, you getting the rights to that book you are going to be fighting with an agency to get the rights to that book because they are owning property. And that to me is the thing. And so even stuff that you’re developing now, I do think that if this weren’t addressed you would have to take these folks on as your partners in order to get to any of that stuff. And that just can’t happen.

**Craig:** Well, you’re right that probably in five years or so the distinction will dissipate entirely, but for the next five years there are a lot of people who are trying to earn a living as feature writers who don’t have agents now. One of the things that the Writers Guild has encouraged is for those writers to seek shelter in the arms of managers, all of whom are entitled to ownership and production of their client’s work, and frequently do, and have done for decades.

So, there’s a little bit of an inconsistency there. We already have representation that does that. If we are committed to eliminating the production of client’s material, we shouldn’t be recommending anybody go to a manager, which by the way is something I say all the time. I’m not a big fan of managers for precisely this reason.

I completely agree with you and this production thing has to be figured out. I mean, at the heart of it there’s really only two things I want. I want to know that the more money a writer makes the more money an agent makes. That connection has to be there. It has to be preserved. And the other thing I want to know is that if an agent has any connection to any entity that has a connection to another entity that owns some of that client’s work it has to be some amount that makes it essentially a silent minority partner. We can’t be run by the people that supposedly are working for us to advocate our interests.

But we’re not going to get there this way. And there’s a real danger of not talking. And there’s a real danger to us just saying, OK, it’s a permanent divorce. For one, as a writer, I don’t like the idea that every writer going into a television show is going to be represented by someone at some agency but the director and the non-writing producer and the actors are going to be represented by these massive agencies. We will lose power.

And I’m a pragmatist. I don’t like all this talk of, you know, the agents are mafia. They’re not the mafia. They’re agencies. That’s what they’re doing. They’re agencies. And they became successful because they do what agencies do. I want them to do it for me. I just want them to do it for me in a way that’s fairer. And we can’t get there until we get back in the room. I’m the back in the room guy. That’s my new official name.

**John:** I hear you there. So, we can speculate a bit on what could be coming next. And this is just free speculation. We’re not committing to any of this stuff. Things that could happen in the near period. Some other small agencies could decide to sign that same agreement. It’s really for the same reasons that Verve did is that they’re not involved in those things that are the big issues and so they might decide to sign.

Agents could move around. I don’t think that’s going to happen a ton and Verve seemed to try to downplay that in their thing, saying like they only want to grow organically. So we’ll see if any of that were to happen.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And whether agents would move and take former clients with them. And we could come back to discussions with individual agencies or the bigger group. A couple different ways that could happen. Craig, what do you think is the way that discussions begin again?

**Craig:** Well, in a case like this where the initial method of communication and exchange of proposals was such a crater, I don’t think you would want to just say, “All right, well let’s just do that again.” It didn’t work. So, in my mind the ideal would be for someone at the guild to kind reach out through a neutral third party mediator, and there are some wonderful people out there that serve that function all the time in business disputes, to say let’s just begin by having a small discussion through a mediator about how to have the discussion. Let’s just begin with that and not throw ourselves back into a situation where we’re set up to fail. Let’s figure out how we’re supposed to talk to each other. And begin that way. Just gently get back in and start undoing a lot of the ill effects of the way this has all gone down. I mean, the current situation as far as I’m concerned is bad for writers.

What I want is a better deal than what we used to have with the big agencies. What I currently have is you can’t be at the big agencies. That’s not better for me. It’s not better for any of us. The good outcome is something that makes sense for us there. At least that’s my feeling. I don’t believe that there is a good outcome where no writer is allowed to be at those agencies, because they won’t cease to exist. Oh, far from it. And we will get hurt if we’re not part of that mechanism.

**John:** I’ve had a lot of conversations with writers who are either doing great or not doing great. And the ones who are not doing great seek me out and I have phone calls with them and I talk to them at mixers. And a question I sort of go back to, which is really helpful for me and I think also helpful for them to frame what they’re looking for, is let’s say this gets to some kind of new normal. Describe the new normal you’re looking for. And that has been really helpful for me to understand what folks are really looking for in the outcomes of these things.

A word that I just – I guess it’s because of Avengers, but man, “end game” comes up a lot. Everyone keeps talking about the end game. And I’m like I don’t know what the end game is. I’m not sure how far we are into the second act. So, I can’t talk to you about the end game. I can only talk to you about sort of what is important to you and communicate that through to everybody else.

**Craig:** I’m going out on a limb here that I think a lot of people are wondering about the end game because we were kind of presented a sense of how things could and would go and they haven’t gone that way. And so the next question is, well, OK, whether or not technically they have or haven’t gone that way there was an impression that this going to lead to something positive and I don’t think there are too many people in the membership who thought the day before this all ended that it was going to go on for four weeks without either party even talking to each other really.

So, there’s a question of is this like forever? Is this for a year? No one seems to know and people are growing concerned because what happens is as you approach month two, whatever was in the pipeline that was being worked on is being exhausted out and now people are going to have to deal with something new.

**John:** I hear you. And, again, there’s some stuff I can’t respond to just because–

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** Of things. But the idea that no one is talking, I understand why it feels that way. It’s not as accurate as one might think. And so I’ll leave it at that.

**Craig:** At the very least that is encouraging. [laughs] And I hope that that, you know, obviously my hope is that that becomes the order of the day rather than something that we’re also kind of sort of doing. But rather the thing that we are focused on.

**John:** Well it sounds like you want a more concerted effort to–

**Craig:** Talk.

**John:** To talk.

**Craig:** To talk. And just so people know, it’s not like I’m just showing up on here after four weeks and going blah-blah-blah. I have been saying this privately–

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** To David Goodman for the last four weeks. So I’ve definitely been sharing my point of view. I’m not sandbagging anybody.

**John:** That’s part of this process. Absolutely.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Let’s move onto the next part of the process which is the pitch process.

**Craig:** OK!

**John:** So this is a thing we talked about doing on the show a while back. I had forgotten about it. Then Megana, our producer, reminded me that we have like 30 of these pitches sitting in her inbox.

**Craig:** Oh man.

**John:** And so went through them. So this is kind of analogous to our Three Page Challenge where we invited our listeners to record themselves doing a 90-second pitch. It could be for a series. It could be for a TV show. And they’ll send it in and we would take a listen to them. And so we’re going to listen to five of them today.

Now, Craig, you have experience doing this because you are often a panelist at the pitch panel thing at the Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** Yes. I have been a judge at the finals of the pitch contest at Austin twice. Both times along with the great Lindsay Doran. It’s a fascinating event. It’s not really what we do.

**John:** It’s not what we do. And so I was thinking about that as I was trying to write my notes for this is that this 90-second thing is not actually a thing that writers do on a daily basis or even ever, kind of. But what I think is interesting about both the Austin version and what we’re going to do today is that it’s like writing a sonnet. It’s forcing you to think about your idea in a very specific form, in a very concentrated form. And the actual skill of doing that is analogous to what it’s like to go into a room and start pitching a project. Even though a pitch in a room is going to be longer, an elevator pitch is going to be shorter probably, it is a thing that is helpful.

And so I think the process of doing this obviously for these five writers but also for people listening, it does make you think about what does this thing I have in my head or this script I’ve written, what does it feel like to a person who is listening and what are the hooks I can use to keep someone’s attention as I’m describing it. So I think that is the valuable part here.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a little bit like debate, like formal debate societies.

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** Vis-à-vis professional attorneys or legislators. It’s a strange side thing. It’s not irrelevant. But it’s not spot on. We don’t really walk around doing these things.

**John:** All right. So the best way to do this is to actually listen to the pitch. Each of these pitches is 90 seconds or less. We’re going to start with one from Karen Welsh. It’s called You’re What. Let’s take a listen.

**Karen Welsh:** This is a feature film. A 56-year-old woman, a failure at pretty much everything, discovers to her delight that for the first time in her life she is pregnant, to the dismay of her about to retire professor husband. You’re What is a dramedy aimed at the over-50 crowd. In case you’re wondering, yes, though very rare a woman in her 50s can naturally conceive. When the media get involved the absurdity of a woman that age pregnant is played for laughs, but the problem with having kids late in life? Baggage. A lot is riding on this baby.

Jill wants to give her agent mother the grandchild she’s never had. But Clara, brokenhearted over a family tragedy, and not impressed by Jill’s many failed attempts to compensate refuses to believe that her daughter won’t disappoint her again.

Then there’s Trevor. His two grown kids from his first marriage are back in his life, making demands, while the broadcast of a reality show upends his dignity, his career, and his home.

At the breaking point Trevor blurts out that he never wanted this baby and in fact he never wanted children, period. Jill is determined to be what she’s always wanted to be, a mother. But Trevor is the one with the emotional arc. Only a moment of emotional clarity will lead him to do the right thing. Happy ending? Nope. Bittersweet.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** OK. So when you guys do this at the Austin Film Festival you get to talk to the person and ask them questions. Now, we don’t have Karen here to ask her questions so we can only respond to just what we heard. And my very first impression is that from the title I was thinking this was a comedy and so then when it was pitched as a dramedy I’m like, oh, really? And then when the dramatic moments happened I was less excited about them.

I think the premise of a 56-year-old woman having a baby for the first time and her older mother I think is really fun. I think the stresses of that and as you’re getting closer to retirement suddenly having a kid is interesting. I want to see all of that. But I think I want to see it in a comedy and not as a dramedy. Craig, what was your impression?

**Craig:** Well, you know, when we do these things we actually don’t really have any kind of back and forth with the people. We just sort of give them a bit of feedback that combines our sense of how interesting did we find their pitch in terms of content and also how did their pitching style help or hurt them.

In this case I found Karen’s style to be a little bit like newscasters talk. It was very formal. And sort of bleached out a little bit of what I would consider as normal human passion for the material. You know, sometimes it can sound really rehearsed and really canned in that regard.

Story wise, I don’t know, is a 56-year-old woman getting pregnant massive news? I don’t think so. I just don’t. I mean, it is a rarity. But I’m struggling a little bit with that part of it.

And I guess the other thing I would say is the way that she relayed her story, a lot of her sentences were complicated sentences, meaning there were clauses and additional clauses. Even the very beginning one, “That’s right, pregnant, much to the dismay of her.” You know what I mean? There’s a certain loss of punchiness because of the ornate over-comma style of the sentence structure.

**John:** Yeah. It feels a little written rather than spoken.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And the pitches have to be that really middle ground between the two. I can see the reality show of it. I can see why that is useful for the feature of it. I can see how it’s exposing the problems and things. But I feel like you have to set up that Jill – there’s a reason why she’s an interesting person to be following at 56 doing that. She’s just an ordinary – you know, she was an office manager. That’s not remarkable. But if she was famous for some other reason or had been famous for some other reason, or she was a soap opera actress. There would be some reason why she’s worth this attention and scrutiny.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because the plot of reality television company comes in and upends normal person’s life we’ve seen quite a few times.

**John:** Yeah. It does feel like a feature though rather than a TV series.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** In that a pregnancy is about one change and then a birth. And so that’s what we kind of want to see. Or, if it’s going past the birth it’s not going much past it probably.

**Craig:** Yeah, there’s a built-in ending. Yeah.

**John:** A literal ticking clock.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Do you want to set up the next one?

**Craig:** So our next pitch is from Hayley Grgurich. And it is entitled Uncertain Texas. Let’s take a listen.

**Hayley Grgurich:** Here’s my pitch for a comedic TV series called Uncertain Texas. Rival podcasters arrive in the same tiny East Texas to discover they’re after the same true crime story. The series follows their attempts to out-maneuver each other without much help from the locals who are suspicious of the podcasters’ motives and inclined to keep their hometown business to themselves.

This idea comes from actual people and places I encountered while living in East Texas, along with the popularity of true crime podcasts and two news stories that stuck with me. The first story was about a man who went missing in an 11-person town in the Australian outback. Police suspected foul play almost immediately. And after interviewing the remaining ten residents also suspected everyone in town.

The second story I learned while I was interning at Esquire. Chris Jones, one of the top features writers, went to a small town in Ohio to report a story. After finishing an interview with the key source he said, just as a bit of housekeeping, that he’s appreciate it if the source didn’t share the information they discussed with anyone until after the story came out. The source looked kind of sheepish and told him he already had. It turned out there was a reporter from GQ in town for the same reason. The discovery sent both writers into a neurotic tailspin as they tried to file competing takes from the same motel.

The combination of Texas characters, professional rivalry, and the goofiness of podcasting really delight me and I think Uncertain Texas can also resonate on a deeper level through exploring the conflict between small town culture and big city interference. Thanks for your feedback. I appreciate it.

**Craig:** OK. Well, John, what did you think about Hayley’s pitch for Uncertain Texas?

**John:** I think Hayley set the table really well. She had a good way of describing what the show was kind of going to feel like and what the real life background was behind this kind of stuff. This idea that there were multiple people who would be going after the same story and crossing paths was real. So I like all of that and I liked her sort of quiet delivery of it all. I think that all worked really well.

She didn’t get to any characters or any story or any plot or any things that would sort of tell us what we’re actually going to see on a weekly basis in this series, or an episodic basis on this, which could be fine. I felt like this was honestly the first 90 seconds of a pitch and right after that then you say like, “Now let me tell you about the characters and what would happen next.” But I’m kind of fine with that. Having heard this, I wanted to hear more which I think is a good sign for a pitch like this.

**Craig:** I agree. Right off the bat you kind of want to be friends with Hayley, you know. She just sounds friendly. You can sense emotion coming through. There’s a little moment at the end where you can tell she’s smiling, even though she’s not visible. And it’s a really interesting idea. It’s a great premise, I think. And what I loved about her pitch was that she explained why she wanted to do it.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So instead of kind of hitting me with the good old, “Jim, 25, is a blah-blah-blah.” She just said I’m Hayley, I’m a writer, here’s what turned me on about this whole thing. There were two stories and they made me want to write this. That’s a huge thing. That actually imparts that sort of passion that you’re hoping for so it doesn’t feel so dry. I really liked it. I thought she did a terrific job.

**John:** I think it’s also good that she wove in the fact that she was an intern. Gives a little sense of her history and backstory within the context of what this project was.

You know, this idea reminds me a bit of A Very Fatal Murder which is the really terrific Onion podcast about a fictitious true crime, but in the best ways. And I think it’s the right way to approach the absurdity of a podcasting universe descending on a small town. Everyone is looking for the dirt and sort of how outsiders stir things up. It reminded me a bit of Schitt’s Creek.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Which is another great sort of outsiders coming into a place. I think there’s a lot of comedic potential here. So, she definitely – she baited the hook really well.

**Craig:** All right, well, John, do you want to take the next one, our third pitch?

**John:** Our third pitch is by Jake Arkie. It’s called How to Make a Man. Let’s take a listen to Jake’s pitch.

**Jake Arky:** Hi Scriptnotes. My name is Jake Arky. And I’m a writer who has a half-hour family comedy pilot to pitch to you guys. My pilot is called How to Make a Man and it’s for a series about when a Mormon family adopts an Indian child with special needs and the patriarch jumps ship which forces the eldest son to step up to become the man of the house.

This is partially based on a true story of my family growing up in Salt Lake City, Utah. We weren’t Mormon, but we were heavily involved in communities that were. And when we adopted my brother from India he kind of change our lives in many different ways. And I wrote this series kind of as a This is US meets Malcolm in the Middle, so there’s some poignant stuff, there’s some comedy stuff, but it’s really about the relationships within the family, especially between the two brothers. And the idea behind it is that we’re seeing so much right now about toxic masculinity and how men are being raised in certain ways that turn out to be bad. So I thought what about making a show semi-based on my life about how we can actually make better men and raise them better.

So, that’s my pitch for you. Hope you enjoy it. Thank you so much.

**John:** Craig, what was your impression of Jake’s pitch, How to Make a Man?

**Craig:** Well, it was nice. It almost sounded like somebody else had written it and then he was describing it because he’s like, “Yeah, it’s got a little bit of this, it’s got a little bit of that.” There was a certain casualness to it. I think it sort of took off at the end. The advice I would give to Jake is that what’s interesting about his pitch is what he said at the end of the pitch which is why do I want to do this. Because for most of the pitch what I’m hearing is, OK, so it’s just a family and there’s a kid and a kid from India isn’t really a reason to have a show. It’s just a kid.

And so I’m just waiting for why I care about this. And then I get to this end part and I go, oh, OK, that’s a whole different thing. I would argue that if you’re going to tell a story about How to Make a Man then you kind of need to do it from the perspective of the person that’s raising a boy into a man, not a brother. So, there’s issues going on there. But it was – I was engaged and I was listening along. I just I think this pitch would have gone 50% better if he had taken the stuff at the end and put it at the front.

**John:** I had a hard time picturing anything as he was describing it. So, I think about the other pitches and I could see something, I was starting to form characters. And I think part of the challenge is I didn’t have a sense of how old the brother who is being adopted into the family was. It’s a very different story if we’re talking about toddlers or if we’re talking about teenagers. And I didn’t have any sense of the grounding of sort of what kind of story I was looking at. So when he said Malcolm in the Middle I’m like, oh OK, so it’s more that age great. And the patriarch thing threw me off a little bit too because I took that to mean the father but I wasn’t quite sure that’s really what I was supposed to be meaning.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You know, sometimes using too specific of a word or too nebulous a word kind of knocks me out of the story for five seconds and when it’s only 90 seconds long it’s a challenge.

**Craig:** That makes total sense. And you’re absolutely right. I mean, there wasn’t much to sort of imagine there. And there was a lot of ambiguity. It’s a weird thing, Jake, because sometimes when you’re basing things on real life you will elide over details that are absolutely crucial to everybody else but they’re not worth mentioning to you because just you know it. But we don’t, so definitely something to think about.

**John:** I would also say that Jake it’s great that this involves part of your real life story. And so including that in the pitch I think is crucial because otherwise we wouldn’t have a sense of why you are the right person to write this story. And so explaining that in part of any pitch is really important.

**Craig:** Agreed. Well, our next one is from Guy Patton and it’s called Sinnerweb. One word. Sinnerweb. Shall we listen?

**John:** Let’s listen right now.

**Guy Patton:** Hi, I’m Guy Patton and my show is called Sinnerweb, and hour-long supernatural police procedural in the vein of X-Files with the feel of a modern western. Essentially it asks what if a young female Longmire were the Sheriff of Twin Peaks. Much of the uniqueness comes from the setting in rural Pennsylvania Dutch Country among the Amish and Mennonite communities there. And draws on the real life legends in mythology of those worlds, a rich and uniquely American folklore pantheon to explore.

For example, Hexenmeisters, essentially witches and warlocks who practice a folk magic using Hex signs and symbols to encourage good harvest or to curse someone and destroy their lives. These are powerful figures in this culture and exist in various forms to this day.

The title is also the main character, Sinnerweb, the sheriff of the strange town of Cavalry and a train wreck. Obviously if you name your kid Sinner there’s probably some family issues there to explore as well, and we do.

Initially when we meet her she is doing some decidedly un-sheriff like stuff. She’s in a bar, drunk, making out with a stranger in a bathroom. Then her deputy arrives to let her know there’s been a tragedy. A young Mennonite woman is found dead at the scene of a devastating fire yet her body is unburned. The investigation of this event, based on a real life story, provides the plot of our pilot. Thanks so much for listening. And if you like Sinnerweb you can read the pilot on the Black List website.

**Craig:** All right. John, what did you think about Sinnerweb?

**John:** So, Sinnerweb, it is two words. So Sinner Webb is her name. So now I know that. I didn’t know what a Longmire was. And so again I got thrown thinking like what is a Longmire?

**Craig:** What is a Longmire?

**John:** We can Google it now.

**Craig:** Let’s do it.

**John:** Longmire was a TV show. It’s a dedicated, unflappable staff of–

**Craig:** Oh, it’s a western.

**John:** It’s a western.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a western.

**John:** Great. I liked that there was a supernatural quality to this. I liked the idea of a really folklore kind of place. Twin Peaks is a good reference for it, but it feels like it wasn’t specifically Twin Peaks-y. So, I like the visuals that you gave me in terms of an unburned body in a burned building. That’s really cool. So I think all these things are really intriguing.

Honestly, Longmire threw me off a little bit and I had a hard time grabbing some early straws in that, but I was intrigued by where it was going.

**Craig:** Yeah. A little bit of overload in the beginning. So in the beginning it’s Longmire, which I don’t know what that is, and it’s a western, and it’s Twin Peaks, and it’s Amish people. Help me. But really, Guy, the funny thing is all you had to say was, “It’s Twin Peaks but Amish.” It’s Amish Twin Peaks and there’s all these mythologies and things and demons and witches and so on and so forth in a culture that we are very familiar with and yet don’t know at all. And then I get it. And then I’m down.

I personally detest characters with names like Sinner Webb. Because I just feel like they were not born of a woman but rather a laptop. Do you know what I mean?

**John:** I totally know what you mean.

**Craig:** I just don’t buy it. I just don’t buy it. I mean, the one that always killed me – I like the big robot movie. What’s the big robot movie where it fights the–?

**John:** Pacific Rim?

**Craig:** Yeah, Pacific Rim. I like Pacific Rim. But that one character is Stacker Pentecost and I’m just like, no, no, no one’s last name is Pentecost and no one’s first name is Stacker. Or, if they are, they would never be together. It just seems so written, you know what I mean?

**John:** It’s like a hat on a hat. Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s a bit of a hat on a hat on a hat. So, I’m like – it’s like a super cool sounding name, Sinner Webb. I don’t buy it. So it kind of like knocked me out a little bit because what I really want is for that person to just be named Carole. I mean, they do this so well on Fargo. By the way, Fargo is how you should be referring to this, I think. Not Twin Peaks. Because Twin Peaks is its own weird freaky thing and it doesn’t sound like you’re doing it. It sounds like you’re doing Fargo but Amish and supernatural stuff.

So, really cool. I would take a little bit of the practiced rehearsed edge off of your thing.

**John:** Yeah. It felt a little salesman-y, like listen and subscribe and give us a ratings on iTunes.

**Craig:** Smash that like button. [laughs] No, but it’s a really cool idea for a show. Don’t name it Sinnerweb and don’t name her Sinner Webb. That’s my god honest opinion.

**John:** All right. Our final one comes from Laura Beck. It’s called Hard Core Vegans. It’s described as a series. Let’s take a listen.

**Laura Beck:** Hard Core Vegans is a 30-minute dark comedy pilot in the vein of Good Girls meets Barry with a little shaggy dog thrown in. What would happen if there were vegan activists who were willing to do literally anything – and I mean anything – to save animals? Hard Core Vegans follows the two founders of San Francisco Vegans Unite. Ally, a granola-munching, Birkenstock-wearing self-righteous mess, and Sam, a fantastically gorgeous and painfully perfect Instagram celebrity vegan. Because of their warring ideologies the two women are always at each other’s throats and one day, after a particularly contentious vegan bake sale, the two women witness a man die and then through a case of mistaken identities are assumed to be the hit people behind the job.

This leads them into an underworld of murder-for-hire where a shadowy character named Rufus gives the women their second job: kill beloved vegan superstar Moby. It turns out Moby isn’t actually vegan and is running a cannibalism ring. I know! Can our heroines kill one of their idols? Will human blood on their hands be OK if it means they can use the money to rescue a bunch of animals? Will they become straight up hit women and murder hella people? That’s Hard Core Vegans.

I’m vegan, and while I’m not a murderer, I swear, I spent quite a bit of time volunteering for animal welfare causes and met some of the most wonderful, funny, passionate people ever who were also a little bat shit crazy.

Ultimately Hard Core Vegans is an extremely dark comedy about what it means to follow your passions and live your dreams. Even if that means you’ve got to get a little dirty. And by dirty I obviously mean murder.

**John:** Craig, talk me through some Hard Core Vegans. What was your first impression?

**Craig:** My first impression was that every single first impression I had was wrong and then I’d have another first impression and then that was wrong. First of all Laura is delightful to listen to and that was a very funny ending. And I happen to know that there – I’m not a vegan – but I read an article once about this crazy schism in the vegan community and it was really vicious. And you think of like vegans as being super positive peaceful people I guess. Nope. They’re just people.

So that part actually was kind of intriguing. I like the sort of satirical aspect to it. Where I just kind of felt myself lifting off the ground in confusion was when Moby suddenly was involved. I just was like I don’t know what this is anymore. But this is one of those pitches where you listen and you go I’m not sure I’m qualified to comment on this. I don’t know what I just heard.

**John:** I think I’m qualified to comment on it. So, like you I kept having new first impressions. Because it’s like, oh, I get what this is. Like, no, it’s not quite what I thought. And it just kept pulling me a little bit away from where I wanted to be. So she starts by Good Girls Revolt, which I don’t know, but Barry, and I can see that. Where it’s like it’s well-intentioned people and it goes into a very dark place. And I love this idea of sort of warring factions of vegans and sort of people with noble intentions who to really dark, dark places. It’s sort of that question of like well what would you do to make the world a better place?

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** How far will you go? That is so intriguing. And I think that is why it is a really good premise for a TV show. And I can see that. The details of sort of how these two women meet and compete and sort of like what their unique lanes are I wasn’t entirely getting. And I didn’t like that they’re mistaken for murder. Like that to me doesn’t feel like – they’re not making an active choice. I want to see these women make a choice that takes them to this place. And that to me is what’s great.

There could be an element of accident, but I think back to 9 to 5 and you look at the murder that seems like it happens in 9 to 5. You are completely on their side and yet they know they’re done something horrible. So, that to me is an opportunity of a way to look at how these women come together to do this thing.

**Craig:** I think that’s really smart. That may have been the thing that ultimately started knocking my dominoes down and I was just so confused was the whole mistaken – mistaken identity, like two people mistaken for hit people, just understand this Laura. That plot point doesn’t just say something about those two characters, it says something about the entire world of your show. And what it says is the world of your show is a bit stupid. Because no one actually confuses a hit person like that, much less two people, much less two vegans. It’s just not a thing.

And then weirdly they are hired to kill a non-vegan who is posing as a vegan. So there’s this weird coincidence that they happen to be confused for killers and also now must kill somebody that’s directly related to the thing that… – You know what I mean? It just starts feeling a bit silly in a bad way. But I’m with you. Like all the things you say you like I like. So I would say Laura you should do what John just said.

**John:** Yeah. I actually like the idea of Moby being a character in this because he’s identified with this kind of movement. I just don’t know that he’s the target for being a hypocrite. I think there’s some interesting way to use him that could be fascinating. If he is the kingpin behind stuff that could be great, too.

I liked him as an element, I just didn’t think killing him was necessarily going to be rewarding for – the best comedic reward for using that element.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m not going to stick around and watch that season. I just kind of don’t care about Moby.

**John:** Craig, what did you think of this whole pitch idea?

**Craig:** I liked it. I mean, it’s definitely a different thing for us and what we’re talking about now is something that we – it’s actually really hard to get to and this was a fun way to do it. How you interact with the world when you’re talking and being a writer in a bar, in an office, on the street, how do you come across and how does your story come across? It turns out actually this matters quite a bit. And so maybe this is the beginning of little kind of training for people about how to just talk about what they’re writing and why.

**John:** I think it’s also a useful way for us to divorce the words on the page in the Three Page Challenge from this general idea. Because when we do the Three Page Challenge it is so focused on what I got out of these three pages and less of like do I think that that’s actually an idea, a premise that is going to be sustainable for a feature or for a series? And we can talk about it kind of on those terms. And also I know Mike, my husband, just tunes out all the Three Page Challenges because he won’t read them. So I think he might actually stick around for these.

**Craig:** He might. I mean, listen, if we can get Mike back we’re onto something.

**John:** We know we hit something. So thank you to everyone who sent in their pitches. I think what we’ve been doing for receiving pitches is you write into ask@johnaugust.com. You attached the recording you’ve made of your pitch.

I think Megana was sampling for a range of storylines and premises and also genres, but also a bit for quality in the sense of like actual recording quality. So just do it in a quiet room. That’s great. But you can use your phone for it. So, send those in and we’ll do it as another feature down the road.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Cool. Craig, this week I sent a little message to you asking about the font you use in Chernobyl. So this is a thing where I’m watching Chernobyl, I’m enjoying it very much, I’m listening to the companion podcast.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** But you have not spoken about the font that is used in Chernobyl and the font is terrific. And so since I actually know the creator of the show I emailed or I messaged you with the most important question about what typeface is being used as the display face in Chernobyl.

**Craig:** So, this was something that Johan Renck and I were very, very, very, very, very, very fussy about. Because for starters we don’t have an opening title sequence. It’s not something that people have remarked upon particularly. We tried. We thought about it. We talked to some incredible people who have designed amazing opening title sequences. We just couldn’t find one that seemed to not disrupt what we were going for which was that kind of verisimilitude. You know, we wanted you to forget that you were watching a television show.

So, with that in mind we said, OK, it’s just going to say Chernobyl. And then we have quite a few place and time fonts as well, or subtitles, that we have to put on there. So the question is what do you show. Here’s we knew we didn’t want to do. That really goofy fake Cyrillic English font thing where, oh look, the R is backwards. No. No. [laughs] Definitely not.

What we wanted to do was impart something that in keeping with the rest of the way we do this show some kind of accuracy to time and place. You know, we can’t show Cyrillic to people. They won’t understand it. But what Johan did was he worked with his brother. And I’m still working on getting all the details for you. But essentially they created a font, as far as I understand. And the font was kind of inspired by Cyrillic fonts. And there’s a number of Cyrillic fonts that came out of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had their own state-run typography department and they did create a number of fonts, including something called – well, it’s referred to as Poor Man’s Futura. There’s a bunch of them. Anyway, the point is rather than font out and dork out, what we went for was that. Essentially an English font that conveyed the truth of what Soviet fonts looked like at the time.

They’ve got weird kerning. Some of the numbers are slightly bizarre for us. And then we messed around with the color a little bit and we fuzzed some of the edges just to make it feel like it was part of 1986. So that is the long and short of – and I suppose we’ll have to come up with a name for it. I mean, I’m going to propose that the name for that font be Renck.

**John:** Oh, Renck would be fantastic. There’s already a typeface called Chernobyl so that would be confusing. What I like about it, Futura is clearly a reference for it. And if you use the What the Font app to look at screenshots of it, which I did, there are faces that are kind of similar to it, but the numbers are really strange and different. You know, it’s a Sancerre face. It has that aspect of weird kerning. You are only using in uppercase which is appropriate because Russian is written in what we would consider uppercase only.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But anyway, it was well done. And I was just – I agree with you that it feels very specific even though it’s not Russian at all. And I think it’s consistent with everyone is speaking English but all the other signage is in Russian. It makes it feel like the right mix.

**Craig:** Great. Well I’m glad it’s working for you. We certainly put a lot of intention on that. I think at times Carolyn Strauss and Jane Featherstone were like are these two font nerds going to ever shut up? Johan far more than I.

**John:** Couldn’t it just be Arial?

**Craig:** Well, Johan definitely took the lead on that one. He gets the credit for this font. And the Renck family, the extended Renck family.

**John:** Nice. It is time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a book that I finished last week. It is called Blueprint: Evolutionary Designs of a Good Society by Nikolas Christakis. It’s really terrific. I heard him on the Gist podcast and he was halfway through his interview and I was like I’m going to buy that book.

The book talks about how humans evolved both biologically and culturally to have a set of social ideas that are really important for how we can function together as groups and as a society. So ideas like love, altruism, selflessness, learning, collaboration, individual identity. They seem really obvious to us, but very few other species on earth have these qualities, or have all these qualities. And it’s hard to imagine that we could actually do most of what we do as human beings if we didn’t have this sense. For example, if you didn’t think of yourself as an individual and think of each other person as an individual who is consistent in time you couldn’t do most of the things that humans do.

So as important as speech is, as important as our hands are, these are probably qualities that let us do what we’ve been able to do on the earth. So, I thought it was just a terrific book. Highly recommend it. It’s sort of in that same zone as the Jared Diamond books or the Steven Pinker books. I loved it.

**Craig:** Great. That sounds like one for me. I like that sort of thing. I wrote a paper about altruism in college and the notion of – and I’m sure that Mr. Christakis gets into this in this book, but the notion that there is a social or rather a survival advantage to being part of a group.

**John:** Oh absolutely.

**Craig:** And so pro-social behavior is encoded into us, in other words we are to some extent at least for a number of people instinctively pro-social. We want to do things that would help keep the group together and cohesive. But interestingly that occasionally expresses itself in ways that are directly detrimental to the individual person’s survival.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Which to bring it back is sort of when you watched things, when I was reading and doing research about Chernobyl and I would see these people do these things I would just think–

**John:** Oh, that’s episode two. That’s like I’m going to walk into the water.

**Craig:** Pretty much. And you’re seeing the expression of this pro-social behavior. There’s a very famous story about a plane crash in the ‘80s in Washington, DC, and the plane essentially went into the Potomac and it was freezing cold. And a man just jumped like 100 feet into the water or whatever it was to save people. And he didn’t know any of them. And he had no connection to any of them. He just did it. And in that moment you think, yep, there it is. That’s that little gene going do-do-do-do.

**John:** Yeah. So it’s obviously – if that person is your own child there’s a genetic component to that so like that would happen with other species. But it clearly goes beyond. We’re wired and our cultural switches are flipped in a certain way that you will do that stuff. You will help a stranger even though it is no benefit to you.

**Craig:** Exactly right. In fact, this explains things like colony insects, like bees.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Bees will happily sting you and die as a result just to protect the rest of the hive. Well why are bees so hive-oriented and so kind of pro-social? Because the way bee reproduction works they are all highly related to each other, more so than say humans. There’s way more overlap. In other words, if I’m dying to protect you I’m still furthering our genetic code because we’re really closely related. It’s a world of twins.

**John:** You can also think about the organism is really the entire colony. The organism is not the individual bee. And to some degree the organism is this human group. And so you will do whatever it takes to keep this human group alive, which could involve individual self-sacrifice. And so when you see nationalism, bad nationalism, it can be as a result of over-identification with that group and not thinking of yourself as an individual.

**Craig:** Yep. No question. No question. That’s a great point actually and the way it backfires.

Well, I’ll go with something that – we’ll just keep along the idea of pro-social work here. So Chernobyl Children International is a wonderful organization. It is based out of Ireland run by a wonderful woman name Adi Roche. And it is a charity that helps support children and various people that have been affected by the Chernobyl disaster across Belarus and Ukraine and just Eastern Europe in general.

And I was lucky enough and had the honor of speaking at the United Nations. Did you know that, John? I spoke at the United Nations.

**John:** You know what? Someone might have told me. It was you. You told me that you were speaking at the United Nations.

**Craig:** John, I have news for you. I spoke at the United Nations.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** So, anyway, when I was speaking at the United Nations because I spoke at the United Nations I was there with Adi Roche. And she really was the one that put it all together. She is a dynamo. And, of course, as people watch the show they may want to be charitable. I think that her organization is a terrific place to start. HBO and I and Carolyn and Jane all were donors. And so I just wanted to put that out there for people if they were feeling like they wanted to throw a little money towards some people who might be in need, Chernobyl Children International is a terrific organization. Obviously a proper charitable organization. And we’ll link to their website in the show notes.

**John:** Fantastic. And that is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from the fantastic Jonathan Mann.

**Craig:** Is this the one?

**John:** This is the one from last week.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** So enjoy this one everyone. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we like to answer on the show. For short questions though I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin on Twitter. Those are fantastic.

If you would like to send in your 90-second pitch you can also send it to ask@johnaugust.com.

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

Some folks have been doing recaps on Reddit and it’s great. So if you want to read a recap of this episode or the last couple episodes go to Reddit. Go the /screenwriting sub-Reddit and you’ll see them there.

You can find all the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net. Or you can download 50-episode seasons. There is a new season that should be up by the time this one comes out which goes through episode 350-400.

**Craig:** Oh man.

**John:** If you’re going to download that one you might want to check out the Scriptnotes Listener’s Guide because that has recommendations on previous episodes that you should not miss. So that’s at johnaugust.com/guide. And you can of course through the app listen to any episode you want at any time and just go to Scriptnotes.net for instructions about the app.

**Craig:** Spectacular.

**John:** Thank you so much for a new feature. 401 and we’re still innovating.

**Craig:** Unbelievable. Here’s to the next 100 and I’ll see you next week.

**John:** Thanks. Bye.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes LIVE](https://theatre.acehotel.com/events/scriptnotes-live-podcast-taping-benefit-hollywood-heart/) on June 13th at the Ace Hotel with Alec Berg, Rob McElhenney, buy your tickets [here](https://www.axs.com/events/374457/scriptnotes-live-tickets?skin=acehotel)!
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* WGA Start Button [Video](https://www.wga.org/contracts/enforcement/start-button)
* John August and Michele Mulroney discussing [Issues Affecting Screenwriters](https://www.wga.org/members/membership-information/agency-agreement/video-updates/agency-campaign-update-issues-affecting-screenwriters)
* [Verve Signs WGA’s Code of Conduct, Citing ‘Meaningful Dialogue’ With Clients](https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/verve-wga-code-of-conduct-sign-1203218082/)
* [WGA-Verve Code of Conduct Agreement](https://www.wga.org/uploadedfiles/members/member_info/agency_agreement/WGA_Verve_Code_of_Conduct_Franchise_Agreement_5-16-19.pdf)
* Pitch Session selections: Karen Welsh *You’re What?!*, Hayley Grgurich *Uncertain Texas*, Jake Arky *How to Make a Man*, Guy Patton *Sinnerweb*, Laura Beck *Hardcore Vegans*
* [Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society](https://amzn.to/2Q7BA7q) by Nikolas Christakis
* Donate to [Chernobyl Children International](https://www.chernobyl-international.com/donate/)
* Watch [Chernobyl on HBO](https://www.hbo.com/chernobyl) and listen to [The Chernobyl Podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-chernobyl-podcast/id1459712981) with Craig and Peter Sagal
* [Find past episodes here](http://scriptnotes.net/), [Scriptnotes Digital Seasons](https://store.johnaugust.com/) are also now available!
* Thank you to everyone who submitted to the pitch session! If you’d like to be considered in the next Pitch Session, submit your entry [here](https://johnaugust.com/pitch).
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* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Jonathan Mann ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

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