Archives for 2020

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/how-to-listen).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 438 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast we’re going to be talking about dialogue and specifically about listening. Then we’ll be answering listener questions about submission agreements, strikes, and character POV. And in our bonus segment for Premium subscribers Craig and I are going to talk about the state of the Democratic primary.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Because Craig I was realizing that there are not enough podcasts that talk about politics. It’s really a gap that’s out there in the media landscape. And so I thought maybe we’d do that and we’ll do it just for Premium subscribers so that the rest of the Internet can’t hear it.

**Craig:** Yeah and they won’t. I’m sure it will never get out. RIP our mentions. It’s my new favorite phrase. [laughs]

**John:** Oy. Oy.

**Craig:** Yeah, oy.

**John:** Oh, something to look forward to at the end of the show, but first some follow up. Some follow up from Episode 436. That was the one where Liz Hannah was on. We were talking about How Would This Be a Movie.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** The last of those was how would this be a rom-com and Craig tell us about the happy endings.

**Craig:** So, you know, you had this married couple, both of them quite beautiful. This was a very good-looking Irish couple. And they were both running for the same office. They were running kind of against each other, so that was the, as the article said, “It sounds like a bad rom-com.” The slight anti-dramatic circumstance of this was that actually there were two seats available and three people were running, so you and I and Liz, I think all three of us thought, you know, of course the movie ends with the two of them winning. And sure enough the two of them won. They were both elected. So they get to go to work together and represent the people of Ireland together. And then they get to go home together. Boy, if they have children those kids are going to look great. God.

**John:** Yeah. Yeah.

**Craig:** Pretty people.

**John:** Good for them. Apparently it was a squeaker of an outcome. And so it was only on a recount or sort of like the subsequent counting of things that she got her seat here. But congratulations to them. Yeah, some version of this kind of story will happen I predict within the next five years. It won’t be based on them specifically but you will see a couple running against each other for political office within five years. I guarantee it.

**Craig:** Ooh, I like where you’re going with this. Well, we kind of have a slight preview of it with the weird relationship between married couple Kellyanne Conway and George Conway.

**John:** True.

**Craig:** Kellyanne Conway the – I don’t know what her job is, Trump Flack I’ll call her – and George Conway, erstwhile conservative, Never Trumper. But they’re married. So, he attacks Trump on Twitter daily. She defends Trump on Twitter daily. And then they go home and just do it like weasels.

**John:** Apparently so. Things we don’t understand but leave them to their relationship.

**Craig:** Whatever it takes, man. You know, I mean, marriage is tough. [laughs] When you’ve been married for a while you’ve got to spice it up.

**John:** Another bit of follow up, Yurian from the Netherlands is a Premium subscriber and he was just listening to Episode 241 in the back catalog. In this episode you and I were discussing a How Would This Be a Movie idea. And I said the following, so let’s play a clip.

“I think the idea of somebody living in your basement is a good starting place for either a thriller or a horror movie, where like somebody in the family thinks there’s something happening in the basement, or the kid sort of sees the person living in the basement and no one else believes him. And like the secret door that he’s hiding behind is so good that you can go down there and you’d swear there’s nobody in your basement. And so you think you’re paranoid. And, of course, there actually is somebody in your basement. And it’s kind of like Panic Room but in reverse.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Yeah. So, Craig, I predicted Parasite apparently.

**Craig:** You didn’t just predict it. Prediction doesn’t give that justice. You did it. [laughs]

**John:** I did it.

**Craig:** That’s it. I mean, of course Parasite is more than the function of its main plot twist, but you even got down to like the secret door that is so good no one knows it’s there. You got it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You got it.

**John:** Yeah, this is crazy. And so Episode 241, this is like three, or five years ago? This is a long time back.

**Craig:** Is there any chance that director Bong listens to Scriptnotes and was like, “Hmm…” No.

**John:** No. Of course there’s not. And honestly of course we were talking about a How Would This Be a Movie which was based on a story in the news which actually turned out to be fake about this scientist who was living in the basement. So, absolutely did not come from me. March 16, 2016 was when the episode aired. So, it did not come from that. But it is a good movie idea twist and I was right then and I was right because that movie won Best Picture.

**Craig:** It’s almost like you yourself are some kind of professional writer.

**John:** Maybe so. Maybe like after all of these years of doing Scriptnotes I’ve come to appreciate what makes a good movie idea.

**Craig:** Apparently you had it halfway through all these years of doing Scriptnotes. This is really good. 241. That’s like 30 years ago. Yeah, we were 12 when you did that.

**John:** We were so young. God, I remember – god, do you remember as we were riding our Penny-farthings down the cobblestone streets?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And we kept talking about if only there were a way that we could have these conversations but people who weren’t here with us in the room could hear these conversations. And you said, “Listen, Hitler is rising in Germany. That’s really what we’ve got to focus on.”

**Craig:** I was concerned about that. But mostly I just remember that I was delighted by my stick and hoop. Ah, the stick and hoop.

**John:** Nothing really beats a good stick and a hoop.

**Craig:** No. That was the best-selling toy of that year. Stick and Hoop. That’s what kids had. They had a stick and a hoop.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** And you know what? I bet it was actually really fun.

**Craig:** It probably was. Probably was pretty good.

**John:** And we’ve not given enough thought to stick and hoop technology.

**Craig:** Yeah. Stick and hoop tech.

**John:** Last week we were talking about treatments. And this week I actually had follow up on sort of the treatment that I had to write that sort of motivated the whole segment. I had the meeting at the studio to talk through stuff. And I will say that like it was actually a little bit easier getting the notes and processing some of the notes because I wasn’t defensive at all about sort of the script I’d written, because I hadn’t written the script yet. We were just talking about the treatment.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, in some defense of the stage of writing a treatment and discussing it that way, it was easier for me to think through stuff because I could just say like, OK, so what we need before I actually implement this note and I wasn’t destroying everything I’d actually already done. I was just not doing work I had not done yet. And so that was helpful and constructive on that front.

**Craig:** It is. And I find, too, that when they give notes on these detailed treatments they themselves are less likely to give you the kind of note that would unravel a ton of things because they can see it themselves how it would unravel a ton of things. As opposed to when you’re sort of in a verbal pitch situation and they might not see those ramifications. So I think it helps everybody. I really do.

I was in a situation where I found myself revising the treatment, which I did not love doing, mostly because I just think like, OK, I agree on points A through C. I don’t agree with D. And then E through H sound great. So, I’m going to do those in the script. And then it was sort of like, “Then can you also just do it in the treatment?” OK.

**John:** I actually have a step in this deal where do I have to turn in a revised treatment. So I’m going to do that and it’s going to be great.

**Craig:** It’s going to be great.

**John:** So it’ll be an even more detailed plan for writing the screenplay hopefully that I’ll get to write.

**Craig:** But this is good. This is a good thing. I like this. I welcome you to the treatment family.

**John:** But I do want to point out a downside, because this is something I’ve heard from several former Scriptnotes producers who are now writers, people tell tale of getting trapped in treatment for forever.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Where you’re constantly revising this document which is not the actual thing you’re trying to make in order please different audiences. And so while I was happy about today’s meeting I definitely can see situations in which it could come into like you never actually get to write a script because you’re always trying to rewrite this treatment.

**Craig:** This is an area where your representative, whether they’re a lawyer or a manager, or a legal agent, should be picking up a phone and saying, “Right, so my client is the most lovely person in the world. They begged me to let them to continue to revise this treatment for you and the 15 other stakeholders in this project. And I said I’m so sorry but no. I’m not going to let them do that. So they’ve gotten all the notes, they get it, it’s time to commence them on the script per the contract.”

I wish that more representatives would do their job.

**John:** That would be fantastic.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** So unfortunately sometimes it does fall to you as the actual writer to say enough and I’m done. It’s time to move onto the next step. Advocating for yourself is a tricky thing. It’s a hard thing to learn but it’s also a thing you end up doing at every stage in your career.

**Craig:** Yeah. Pretty much. And part of the job unfortunately of being a screenwriter in Hollywood, it’s not anything that should be part of our job, it certainly has nothing to do with writing, is the ability to determine exactly where you stand and then apply an amount of leverage and self-advocacy that is concomitant with your standing at that moment. Because a lot of writers push too hard when people actually want to get rid of them. And a lot of writers don’t push hard enough when people are desperate to keep them.

**John:** Yep. It’s absolutely true. And I do have to single out your use of concomitant, because again a word I’ve read and never tried to use in conversation. Well done, Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Thank you. And I give it as a gift to you.

**John:** Aw. Thank you. We have talked a lot about assistants and assistant pay this last year on Scriptnotes. A thing we’re going to put out this week, Megana before she left on vacation she reached out to a bunch of people who had written into the show and other assistants she knew asking for their advice to showrunners who are staffing up rooms for the new television season. And so this is advice that assistants, so writer’s assistants, script coordinators, what their advice is for these showrunners and for these rooms as they’re being put together.

We put it together as a little PDF and so people can download it. I’ll also have it up on the website to take a look. But Craig I thought you and I might take a quick look through here and just highlight some of the things that assistants have said.

**Craig:** This is great. First of all, no surprise, it looks beautiful. So well done on the fonts.

**John:** Thank you. That was me.

**Craig:** Yeah, you did a great job there. And I like the fact that you’ve got the headers are Sans-serif and then the actual body text is – I like it when things break up like that. So this looks like the kind of thing that should go on the wall, sort of like the Heimlich poster that goes on the wall in restaurants. So this is great.

The first category is Respect Boundaries. Basically don’t treat your employees like they don’t have a life beyond the job they’re doing.

**John:** Yeah. One piece of advice here I like is don’t procrastinate and stay late and make your staff stay late too. Yeah, you know what? That’s true. As a writer I do procrastinate, but I shouldn’t procrastinate in a way that makes everybody else suffer.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I also like this: don’t use your assistants as emotional support and therapy. Don’t overshare about your life and feelings. So, there’s a show that I’m a consulting producer on called Mythic Quest, which is on the air right now on Apple–

**John:** Congratulations, Craig. I meant to single you out on that. Nicely done.

**Craig:** Is it called Apple Plus? Apple TV? Apple TV Plus? I should probably know this.

**John:** Apple TV Plus.

**Craig:** Apple TV Plus. It’s a really funny show. Rob McElhenney and his team have done a great job. Megan Ganz, among others. And there’s a character Carol who is the head of HR at this videogame company. And everybody treats her as their therapist. She’s like, “I’m not – I’m in HR.” People come to her and they’re like, “I’m in love with one of my coworkers. I don’t know how to tell them.” And she’s like, “My god.” “I’m worried that someone is going to report me.” And she’s like, “If they did, I would be the person they would be reporting to. I am not your therapist.”

This is one of those boundary lines that people blithely cross all the time. This is excellent advice.

**John:** I want to say if we keep watching future episodes of the show will we see more of your influence and presence in the show?

**Craig:** You will see my character, Lou, I think he’s in almost every episode in the second half of the season, and I have been told and have no reason to disbelieve that he’s going to be back for quite a few episodes in season two which is currently underway. And, yes, and there’s some other stuff that, yeah, I’ve been helping with with those guys there. They’re great. So, there may be more influence.

My character will never have more than one or two lines. [laughs] I like those characters that just pop in, have one or two lines.

**John:** Yeah. You’re like a Creed.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like Glenn the Demon on The Good Place. Ah, The Good Place. That was such a nice ending. I really loved it.

**John:** That was so lovely. Yeah.

So, to wrap up with our assistant pay stuff, because we got a little sidetracked there, just really simple advice and we tried to keep it as just short quotes from the actual people. There are 20 assistants who wrote in with their opinions. We sort of chopped it all up and put it into categories. But hopefully this will be useful for assistants to be thinking about, but more importantly for shows to be thinking about as they’re ramping up for this next – shouldn’t even really call it a season. Like, TV just never stops now.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But more rooms are being put together in this period than last month.

**Craig:** This is a great document. Just sample headline, “Set Expectations. Tell Us Who is in Charge. Delegate Thoughtfully. Solicit Diverse Perspectives. Give Appropriate Credit. Know How Much We Make. Keep People Healthy. Invite Assistants Inside.” These are all really good things.

And this is an eminently reasonable document. This is not some kind of revolutionary screed. This is something that any decent showrunner would want to do I should think. So, it is well-written and it is followable which is the most important thing. I can’t imagine anybody looking at this and going, “No.”

**John:** “No, none of this.”

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s just like wake up. Get yourself – be a woke showrunner when it comes to your assistants.

**John:** Great. All right, let’s transition to a discussion of dialogue. So this is going to be a craft episode. This is where we’re going to talk about the things that characters say in movies, which is what people outside of the industry think all screenwriters do is just to write the dialogue. That’s all we do, right Craig? We just write the words the pretty people say.

**Craig:** I thought the actors wrote that. I thought they came up with what they say. [laughs]

**John:** Oh, that’s right.

**Craig:** I don’t know what we do.

**John:** We write down what they’ve said.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Just so that there’s a record of it. Yeah.

**Craig:** Of course. We write down what the director wants to do. You know, in the old movies the director would walk up to the actors and say, “OK, in this scene you’re coming in and you want her to do this. And she’s going to say no to that.” So there’s no script at all and in fact on any given day what you’re shooting is whatever the director imagined. And then the actors make up their dialogue and the director goes, “Cut. Print. Moving on.” Mm-hmm.

**John:** Mm-hmm. So when Greta Gerwig was on the show a couple episodes back we were talking about mumblecore which was the movement that she was an important part of. And classically in mumblecore it’s very under-scripted. There’s a plan for sort of what the movie is about. There might be a plan for what the scenes are. But they’re not detailed plans for who is saying what and what’s happening. And so she came out of that movement and I was surprised that as someone who emerged from that movement that she’s so fastidious and meticulous about what the words are on the page and exactly when overlapping dialogue is going to overlap.

And she said that really did come out of the experience of like being an actor who was not given lines to say. She kind of felt boxed in by not knowing what was going to come next. There was not a plan for how to get through stuff. And that she really loves having written dialogue that she can work from so that she can actually find everything else in the scene and not to be worried about, ah, what am I going to say.

**Craig:** I am not surprised by that at all because when you think about the way conversations work in the real world a lot of times one person is just dominating the other. And if you put two characters in a room without a script that has not been balanced and thought through carefully by a screenwriter, one actor may very well dominate the other. And that’s – how is that good for anybody?

**John:** It’s probably not good for anybody. So in this discussion of dialogue I want to start by looking at realistic dialogue. Really how people would speak in the real world. And the way you find out how people speak in the real world is to listen to them. And, you know, you can eavesdrop on people. You can just be paying attention to conversations happening around you. But to really notice people don’t talk in real life the way they do in movies. And when you see movie dialogue that feels artificial, it’s because it’s as if they’re talking in a movie rather than actually how people could speak in real life.

And movie dialogue tends to be an optimization. A synthesized version of real speech. But it has to be based on some real speech. So I thought we’d take a listen to some real life speakers and how they’re doing things. Listen to them and then after each clip talk through what we’re hearing and sort of how we could do that on the page and sort of what lessons we could take from the clip we’ve heard and apply it to the actual dialogue we’re writing.

**Craig:** I love this so much.

**John:** Great. It was actually harder to find some of the stuff than I would have guessed. So, online you can find a lot of examples of recordings of people about their accent and where they’re reading the same text so you can hear specifically how they’re doing diphthongs and upspeak and stuff. But I wanted to hear people talk in sort of more natural conversation. This first one is from a clip about Appalachian English or mountain talk. And so let’s take a listen to this.

**Male Voice:** Everybody hears about Graham County, don’t they? And how good the people is, how they’re happy. I run into people I don’t know, ever seen them in my life. And I help them in any way I can. Somebody the other day said you’ll get knocked in the head. And I said, well, if I do I’m just knocked. It’s just good-hearted. Everybody you meet, just 99% of them. If I didn’t live here I’d move, wouldn’t you?

**Male Voice:** Where you going to go on vacation? If I was going to go on a vacation I’d just stay right on here.

**Male Voice:** Oh yes.

**Male Voice:** On my days off I’m in here.

**John:** All right. So there’s so much to unpack there. And so obviously we should spend a long time on his accent, which is fascinating. But I really want to look at his choice of words and sort of how he’s putting his thoughts together.

That question at the end, like “don’t they” at the end of something. It’s an emphasis. It’s a softener. You know, he’s not speaking in straightforward sentences that end in periods. There’s question marks at the end of things that’s not kind of classically uptalk. You know, his use of the verb to be, he’s using is where we would traditionally use a different form. There’s a lot there that you could write down and it would give you a very good sense of his voice as a character.

**Craig:** Yeah. His sentences, let’s just call them phrases, because sentences is really a function of prose. When we talk we talk in phrases. And his phrases are usually built around a word. So they’re not balanced phrases. They’re leading up to a thing. Like wood. Like carrying wood. Like I’m going to say something about a garbage bag. I’m going to say something about blah-blah. Mountain talk. I love talk by the way. Talk.

**John:** Talk.

**Craig:** Talk. So there’s a certain staccato element to it. And they’re built around a single thing. They’re not complicated in terms of structure. There’s no internal clauses. The sentences are very direct. Very clipped. Love that.

**John:** Yeah. So, if you were to write this kind of character into your script, my instinct would be if he’s using alternate words for places, use those alternate words to reflect what he’s actually doing, but don’t go crazy trying to indicate the dialect and to try to spell things the way he’s saying them. Because that’s only going to be frustrating for the reader. And it’s not actually going to be helpful for the actor or anyone else down the road. Craig, what do you think?

**Craig:** I completely agree. So, what you don’t want to do is get into that weird, because it almost looks like you’re just making fun of it or something. Use the words. I’m a big believer of the flexibility of language when it comes to these things. Obviously I wrote a show where people in Soviet Ukraine were speaking English with English accents. I just think what is the most natural thing to convey – intent. But with a character like this I think it’s fair to use vocabulary, like you say, that we might not know. And then I think about the reader as somebody that just like you when you’re listening to somebody like this instead of stopping them every single time they say a word you’re not quite sure of, you wait. And you try and figure it out yourself using context. And generally speaking we kind of can. So, the point is you got the basic idea, right?

And if you were totally confused then that’s an interesting thing to happen. So you just think how would I actually receive this. Would I be able to piece it together and get the basic idea? Or would I be utterly lost? That’s a good decision that you should make as a writer.

**John:** Another thing to listen for is how a speaker will incorporate other people’s speech into what they’re saying. And so people don’t say like “and then he says blah-blah-blah.” They will actually just shift their voice a little bit to indicate that it’s a different person speaking within their own speech. And so listen for how characters do that in movies, but also how folks do that in the real world. And that a person will be speaking as two different people without necessarily making it crystal clear on the page what they’re doing.

And so what you might end up doing in a block of dialogue is putting some of that stuff into italics to indicate that you’re speaking as the other person. Or sometimes you need to break that out as a parenthetical. But people can convey a surprisingly dense amount of information in what’s actually a very short bit of dialogue there.

**Craig:** My grandparents did this very Brooklyn thing. When they would tell a story about something that happened to them in the past, even like a day earlier, “Oh, I ran into Rose at the market and she says…and I says…and she says…” It was always she says, I says. So says, sez, became this all-purpose describer of her turn to talk, my turn to talk. But it was always there. It was never we’re just going to shift with voices. And it was never I said and she said. It’s the weirdest thing. I remember as a kid just thinking that is bizarre. But they all did it.

**John:** They’re staying in the present tense as they’re narrating a past event. And that’s really common.

**Craig:** But also violating the conjugation of the verb to say.

**John:** Oh, of course.

**Craig:** Because it’s not “I says.” It was like says became a new way of saying said.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s very interesting.

**John:** Vernacular is great. Let’s take a listen to this is a woman who has moved to Austin, Texas. I’m not clear where actually she moved from. She’s being interviewed by a person, so it is a little bit more – it’s not a natural conversation, but it reminded me sort of if you were being deposed as a witness. Or often in movie scenes someone has to sort of tell a history of something. And it feels more like that. So, let’s take a listen to this lady from Austin.

**Female Voice:** About eight years ago we picked Austin. We didn’t know anything about Austin. None of us had ever been to Texas. We didn’t even honestly know it was the capitol of Texas. I mean, I’m embarrassed to say, but I didn’t know anything. I thought it was a small town actually. And so we flew to Austin, my husband and I flew to Austin, and we really liked it. And we came here for about a week on our own for our little vacation and then we flew our boys in. They both lived in different places. And we flew our boys in. And so we had a family vacation for a week with just my husband and myself and then a week with our boys.

**Male Voice:** Great.

**Female Voice:** And we all really liked Austin, but yeah, we just thought oh well, Austin. It was just another place we’d, you know, gone. And we went to a lot of the different sites. You know, Lady Bird Lake. And the wildflowers. And we took a tour of the capitol. And we did all kinds of things like that.

**Craig:** So this is not actually a lady from Austin.

**John:** No. It’s a lady who has moved to Austin.

**Craig:** She has moved to Austin. Interesting. So she doesn’t have that classic Texan accent. Even the Austin accent which is quite a bit more muted than like a Houston accent or a Dallas accent. Very singsong-y. Very kind of rambly tale-telling. I like it. Not an efficient talker.

**John:** Well, there is an efficiency, but there’s no periods in that whole clip. She basically–

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s as if she never wants to actually finish a thought so somebody else could interject. I also think it’s really interesting how she is continuously clarifying what she just said.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So when we moved to Austin, we moved to Austin, my husband and my boys and I, blah-blah-blah. It’s commas, and commas, and commas. She sort of clarified the thing she just said. Not to soften it but just to paint out the whole picture of stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a kind of indecisiveness going on in there, even the details of the story are somewhat indecisive. We got to Austin and it was just another place. It was just Austin. But as she’s telling it you can kind of feel like she’s building it as she goes and revising it as she goes. And when she makes a list it’s like a this, and then a this, and then a this, and then a this.

Because efficient is not a term of judgment. Efficient would be I visited Austin with my husband. I loved it. I thought perhaps I could live here. I invited my sons. We looked around. And we decided, yes, we want to live her. That is efficient. This is more of a kind of exploration, you know, kind of verbal discovery. Some people discover as they go. And I do think you’ve pointed out something really smart. Some people do speak with a kind of grammatical integrity. I’m aware that I’m one of those people that speaks with a certain grammatical integrity. Most people do not. Most people will stick sentences inside of sentences and then abruptly cut it off and begin something new. And that’s an important part of understanding the music of dialogue.

**John:** A thing that frustrates me often as I read interviews that I’ve done for people is they will try to transcribe literally what I said, which has a lot of ands. Basically one continuous thought that never really stops. And so I will tell people, no, no, it’s OK. You can put in periods in places. Because otherwise it will feel sort of like what this lady was talking about where it just keeps going, and keeps going, and keeps going. You do sometimes want to provide some structure here.

The other thing I think is important to understand about the context of this, she seems a little bit nervous.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** During this interview. I think that’s part of her rambling is her being nervous. But it’s also a weirdly artificial thing for it to not be a true conversation. If she was doing that and she was in a conversation with somebody, they would talk over the other person, or give “uh-huhs” or affirmatives to keep the flow going. And so she’s trying to keep the flow going by herself and it’s a little bit like dancing by yourself. It’s a little bit awkward what she’s doing.

**Craig:** Yes. There are people that are not comfortable leading a conversation. Just like we were saying some actors could easily dominate another actor if they were all left to their own devices. I suspect that this woman is not comfortable leading a conversation solo like that. This is not somebody practiced in the art of soliloquy.

So, there are moments where I suspect she’s waiting for somebody to jump in and they don’t. And she’s filling space to kind of be able to get to the next thing because she was not necessarily prepared to immediately go to the next thing or explain herself. It can be eerie when somebody asks you a question and then never interrupts you. You start to feel like perhaps you’re slowly hanging yourself because you just keep talking. Because you’re waiting for an interruption that never comes.

**John:** That’s a very classic technique, especially in documentary interviews, where they’ll just let you be silent for a moment. You’ll answer a question and they just won’t put another question back. And so therefore you’re just like I’ve got to keep talking. I’ve got to get stuff out there. It’s a very natural instinct. I remember I had to do a deposition for this legal case and at first I was trying to explain everything. And then in a break the lawyers on my side said you’re trying to explain this as if you’re on a DVD commentary. Don’t do that. Just answer the question in an efficient way as you can and move on.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s all about context. I’m sure in other situations she could be much more what we’re saying efficient and direct and not try to keep the conversation going.

**Craig:** But there is a beauty to it. Again, the poetry of somebody stringing it all together in one long melody is really useful. This is very useful. People really should be listening carefully to this. Just so we’re clear about what happens when we read things, and when people in Hollywood receive scripts, the very first thing that will stick out is bad dialogue.

It is not the worst sin that you can commit. Dialogue can be repaired. The worst sin you can commit is a boring story about nothing that matters. But, no one will realize it’s a boring story about nothing that matters on page one. What they will recognize maybe even halfway down the page is that no one sounds like a human being. So this is really important for people to hopefully absorb.

**John:** One thing I should point out here is if you were to put what she said into your script it would be terrible. It would be terrible because it’s not interesting at all. Because I don’t care about anything that she’s saying right there.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But if she were talking about something interesting and she was talking about it in the way that she’s talking about it there, that could be great. If she had to describe the events of a night, like a horrible thing had happened and she had to describe it and she was using some of that stuff. That would be fantastic. Or if she was trying to conceal something. Love it. That could be great.

**Craig:** Yes. There’s a tendency writers have to convert every human being into a grand orator when it is time to talk about something that is important or hurtful or emotional. Suddenly they become these beautiful speechmakers. That is not how people tell these stories. I’ve listened to people tell heartbreaking stories. And that is when they’re at their most inefficient. And stilting. And self-interruptive. And self-denying and contradicting and fixing and repairing.

It’s what makes us human in those moments. Emotion does not make us more eloquent. It makes us less eloquent.

**John:** Yeah. A great example is the scene in Marriage Story where Scarlett Johansson’s character, she has an incredibly long speech where she’s in the office with Laura Dern. Laura Dern, everything she’s saying is practiced because she’s given that exact same talk a hundred times. Scarlett Johansson’s character is discovering these things for the first time and it’s going to be inefficient, but it’s also going to be emotional and have this ability to cycle back on itself. So both kinds of speech can happen in the same scene.

**Craig:** Yeah. There are characters, like I think of the character that Jared Harris plays in Chernobyl. He is a scientist and he is someone whose emotions are very bottled up. He’s an emotionally constipated man. And he’s very intellectual. And when it comes time for him to say something important at long last when he does it does have a sort of speech integrity to it because he’s that kind of person. I believe it from him. I don’t think I would believe it from say Stellan Skarsgård’s character. When Stellan Skarsgård’s character, Boris Shcherbina, has a moment where he is emotional and needs to declare something, it comes out as a series of outrageous cursing and then just violence towards a phone. Because he is not an intellectual man. And he does not speak in that way.

It’s just important. It’s one of the ways that we help defeat the most dreaded of notes. “All of your characters sound the same.”

**John:** The worst. So, these were two examples of people speaking by themselves. I was looking for better examples of dialogue and interaction between characters which was surprisingly hard to find until I remembered, oh that’s right, there are podcasts. So this first clip I want to play is from the Las Culturistas podcast is by Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers. It’s a weekly podcast or semi-weekly podcast. They had Ben Platt on. And so this is the three of them talking. So just notice how they talk over each other. How they acknowledge what the other person is saying. How thoughts don’t get completed and sort of get clarified before the full thing was done. How they know you’re a little bit ahead of where they’re going so they don’t feel like they have to finish thoughts. I thought it was just an interesting clip. So let’s take a listen to this clip with Ben Platt.

**Matt Rogers:** You’re telling me like when you’re like doing a show on a Friday night, are you giving it a little bit more than you are on a Sunday? On a matinee? Tell me.

**Ben Platt:** Uh, it depends. It’s like very specific to the actual night. It depends who I know is in the audience. It depends how many shows are left in the week. Because sometimes, obviously because it’s a Friday night it’s exciting, it is like easier to give more than on Sunday. But also Sunday you have 36 hours ahead of you that are free, so you can kind of give abandon. So it depends. I would say like a Wednesday Matt is not ideal.

**Matt:** Not the best.

**Ben:** To come to, unless you’re like 65 and up.

**Matt:** Yeah. Yeah. And you get that little discount ticket.

**Ben:** There’s definitely like an A, B, C version of the show that you have to have.

**Bowen Yang:** Yes.

**Ben:** This is what I’m doing if I feel completely healthy and I have all of the faculties. And then B is like I’m trying to save a little for something exciting at the end of the week. And C is like I can barely be bothered to be here.

**Bowen:** Oh wow. You’ve like very clearly delineated all of these scenarios though.

**Ben:** Oh yeah. I’ve spent a lot of time in that wonderful show.

**Matt:** In that show. So basically, wait, hold on. So do you usually know when someone notable is coming? And do you prefer to know?

**Ben:** I ask to know. So I would receive like literally like an itemized list before like a half hour every night of everyone that was there. Because at the beginning it was–

**Matt:** You don’t want to go out on stage and then see Beyoncé.

**Bowen:** Right.

**Ben:** One million percent. Like I don’t want to clock Meryl like mid-number. And also like in that show in particular like I spend so much time out at the fourth wall or whatever.

**Matt:** Yeah.

**Ben:** So like I’m going to see. And it’s a small house, so I’m going to see whoever it is. And they’re always in the same like nice house seats. So I love to have all the information. That’s like a theme in my life in general is I like to have all the information.

**Matt:** Please. Beforehand.

**Ben:** Because anything unknown is far more anxiety-provoking to me than just like dealing with what the actual reality is going to be.

**John:** All right. So this feels like three people around a table. You can imagine they’re in a diner and they’re having this conversation. So, it’s a little bit heightened because it’s a podcast and there’s microphones in front of them, but it feels pretty genuine to what they would actually be, how they would actually be talking as a group. And you notice there at the very end Ben Platt starts a word and stops it and just keeps going on. He knows you know what he’s going to say and he can just sort of keep moving on to the next thought.

I also really want to point out how much along the way the other two guys are acknowledging and sort of affirming what he’s saying. They’re checking in that they’re actually hearing and they’re listening to him.

**Craig:** That’s the thing that I picked up on the most. So, first of all, these three guys are young. I mean, they’re not young like children, but they’re younger than we are. So there’s a certain youth to their discussion and it is indicated by energy. They are all three of them very energetic. They are listening intently to each other and their conversation is a little bit, I’m not going to say combat, it’s not competition, but it’s a group sport. They understand, each one of them, that they’re supposed to be talking. Right? No one is just going to be quiet for a while.

**John:** It feels like they’re all learning forward.

**Craig:** Yes. They’re all leaning forward. So, what that means is, and you can tell Ben Platt understands they’re leaning forward and he’s used to it. He’s fine with it. But that means he has to speak really quickly. Listen how fast he’s talking. Because he knows they’re fast. They’re on everything he says. There’s no chance for him to slow down, because immediately one or two of them, Bowen or Matt, or both at the same time will go “Yes.” Which as you point out is affirming. They themselves are playing a role of supportive interviewer who wants to play.

So, they don’t just say yes and then ask a question. They also notice the kinds of things he’s saying and then they kind of kick it back and make a little observation, a slightly humorous observation. This is very naturalistic. Count how many times all of them say the word like. A billion. But it’s not dreadful. It’s not caricature. It’s just a natural sort of use of the vernacular like. And they have no problem interrupting each other. Interruption is almost essential to that kind of discussion.

**John:** Yeah. So I think when we’re talking about natural dialogue I think too often we’re assuming it means slow. That it means it’s paced down and it’s very sort of stuff just comes out when it sort of comes out. This is natural dialogue. People are doing kind of what they would naturally do. But it is pretty fast. It’s like it’s Sorkin-level speed. And the conversation they’re having isn’t exactly sort of what you’d expect in an Aaron Sorkin movie. You can imagine having this kind of discussion in an Aaron Sorkin script.

Now, think about what this would actually look like on the page. You wouldn’t have all of those affirmations being put in as dual dialogue or interruptions there along the way. It would be far too much. But you would need to have some indication that people are freely able to speak over each other and that we’re able to process both conversations happening at the same time. This would be a great example of Greta Gerwig’s script where she does the little slashes in the dialogue to indicate where overlaps are supposed to happen.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** This would be great for that.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it implies a certain kind of direction as well. Because when you are shooting a scene like this, if I’m making a movie and in the movie there’s a scene where Ben Platt, Bowen Yang, and Matt Rogers are discussing how Ben Platt either does or doesn’t go full out on a given performance based on the day, and how he reacts or wants to react when famous people are in the audience, their conversation is so simultaneous and fast and Bowen and Matt are so interactive with Ben. And we understand that the ground rules of their discussion are such that anyone at any point can jump in and talk and not stop the train. You need to shoot it where all three of them are visible.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** Because what happens when you’re shooting and there’s only one person on camera you can’t have anyone overlap with them because it won’t cut together with the master shot where they all are. So, it implies, in my mind at least, it implies you want a master shot and you almost – there’s a version of this where you just move the camera slowly around the table. And the camera doesn’t necessarily respond to what anyone is doing. You’re just absorbing the speed and the rhythm of it.

**John:** Yeah. The other option of course here is that you’re shooting multiple cameras at once. You could be on singles on people as long as you were actually doing the same shot.

**Craig:** 100%.

**John:** That’s the other option to sort of get into that situation. But it does feel very – it’s very live, very present. This is rat-a-tat-tat stuff happening here. And the whole show is pitched up at that speed.

**Craig:** Yes. I love the speed of it.

**John:** So here’s a different example. And this one feels a little bit more sitting back rather than leaning forward into the conversation. This is from a podcast called F-Work, But I’m Going to Go. This one is just two women. They have this podcast every week. They’re friends. They’re having a conversation. But let’s take a listen to their clip.

**Female Voice:** I would love to travel and work.

**Female Voice:** I would say I would – I would trade anything to have that life again. Letting the company pay for everything.

**Female Voice:** Everything.

**Female Voice:** On my travel. True. Oh my gosh, like and you just go a couple of seminars, you know. You work with a couple of teams. That’s it. And then after that you’re good. You got a day, a day and a half, or two days to chill.

**Female Voice:** Especially when I used to travel back and forth to Houston like it was just great. Because I’m like [unintelligible], tour the Budweiser facility, I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that. And get to hang out with my friends down there. You can really make places a second home at that point when your job is paying them for—

**Female Voice:** Hey I’m going to be in the city on so-and-so, so-and-so date.

**Female Voice:** Right.

**Female Voice:** And then especially if you know somebody there, you can take that. I could use this little hotel money for some more food and drink. Give me that American Express card.

**Female Voice:** Right.

**Female Voice:** So, yeah.

**Female Voice:** Cash me out.

**Female Voice:** But the people that don’t have that work-life balance, I couldn’t imagine like just the money sacrifice for your mental health. Like does that money, does your pay rate, does your salary sacrifice for you not having a life?

**Female Voice:** But see I’m just trying to think about what millennials that I know that I don’t know have a work-life balance.

**Female Voice:** I don’t know none, but you know it’s some out there.

**Female Voice:** Of course. Of course.

**John:** So, as opposed to the other conversation which felt very leaned forward, this one felt leaned back to me. This feels like people who are comfortable in their chairs having this conversation. So they’re very actively listening, but there’s not that frenzied pitch of sort of like got to get on the next thing, got to get on the next thing. And there’s no hunger to be funny, or to score a point.

**Craig:** Correct. So the difference here contextually is what happens when you’re dealing with a conversation where three people who don’t necessarily know each other are conducting an interview and being hyper engaged or two people who know each other really well. These two women know each other really well. It almost seems like what’s happening is they share a brain. And they’re having thoughts and they’re just alternating which one of them is going to say the shared brain’s thoughts. Because they’re in utter agreement and there’s no inquisition. It’s just a complete commiseration, celebration of agreement. The pace of it slows down because they’re in no rush to kind of impress or keep anyone’s interest, by the way.

They don’t seem to be aware that anybody would be listening. They are literally there for each other. It’s wonderful.

**John:** Yes. But I need to point out this is Episode 404, so this podcast has been going on for a very long time.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** Which I think is also great. So they have such a long history. You know, as long a history as you and I do basically. And they know each other so well, so they can sort of anticipate the brain.

Now let’s think about this kind of conversation in your script. And talk about first what they’re talking about. They’re talking about work-life balance. They’re talking about taking business trips. Their conversation is so terrific and specific to sort of what they’re looking for in a business trip and sort of what is important. And how they would describe it versus two other people would describe it versus two other people is what makes these characters’ voices seem distinct and different. So it’s not about, yes, these are two young black women and they have millennial voices. There’s vocal fry. There’s all these sort of like very specific things about the actual audio tone of the language which is so great and worth studying.

But just the words on the page and sort of how they are framing their thoughts about it is what makes their conversation unique and specific.

**Craig:** Yeah. For something like this if I were trying to build a scene with these two women having a conversation about this topic my concentration would be on the woman who is listening. Because the interesting parts in a weird way between these two, at least in terms of their dialogue, is when the moment of agreement and hand-off occurs. “Yes.” I love – I mean, there’s this drawn out thing that happens which is much different than when Bowen and Matt go, “Right,” together. “Right.” This is like, “Yes!” It’s like a relief. You just said something true.

And I love the person listening and it’s like they’re hearing this wonderful – it’s like eating delicious food and then going, “Yes, this is so good.” And now let me talk. And then I want to switch over to the other one. And I would be describing them. And even editorially I would constantly be on the person listening, because that’s where to me at least that’s the fun part of these two is how much they – it’s their agreement. It’s their joy of agreement.

**John:** It’s easy to imagine characters who are like these two women in your story and finding great things for them to talk about. And I sort of like keep wanting to give them stories to hear how they would talk through it and how they would wrestle with a problem. So I kind of want to see them solving mysteries. I want to see them doing stuff because I think they actually have a really cool relationship with each other and it’s exciting to think about how they would talk about the stuff they’re encountering.

**Craig:** There’s something also very comic about agreement. I don’t know why. It’s just funny. When you imagine a scene where someone is explaining something to another person. Maybe they’re in opposition. But they have an ally with them. So they’re delivering a speech. And their ally occasionally goes, “That’s right. Damn straight. Amen. Sure said something there.” And at some point the person is going to turn to them and go, “Would you shut up? Stop agreeing.” Agreeing is funny. I don’t know why. It’s just the notion of just full agreement is amusing to me.

So, when I’m listening to them I have a smile on my face just from how happy they are to agree. And it’s a different kind of, like I said, there is a purity and an intimacy to these two because they don’t have any motives here. They’re not trying to get somebody to open up and inform them or educate them about their process or anything. There’s no guest. It’s just the two of them. It’s lovely.

**John:** We often think about well scenes have to have conflict and if there’s no conflict then there’s no scene. That is still largely true. But the conflict doesn’t have to become between the two characters who are talking in the scene. The conflict can be about what is happening in this situation. A conflict could be an outside party. But like it doesn’t mean that the two characters in any scene have to be directly in conflict. That’s not at all a goal.

Something about their relationship also reminded me about Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn in Swingers. And like, yes, they have contrasting styles, but they’re also buds and they can hang out. And the ability to hang out with interesting people is something that dialogue should give us.

**Craig:** There’s also the potential for – if we know you have a conflict, right, there may be an instinct to just get to the conflict. Jane shows up and tells Sheila, “I’m angry at you. Here’s why.” But sometimes the best way to introduce conflict is to just have an agreement fest and then suddenly on point seven someone says this and the other woman goes…

There’s a great sketch if you want to talk about dialogue and how much you can do with one word, there’s a great Key and Peele sketch where they play two women and one of them, Key, is going on and on about how she’s done with her man. And Peele is playing her friend. And all she says is, “OK.” And she has a thousand different Okays for like exactly, completely, I totally agree, right, oh that’s so true. And then Key’s character starts to say some things that are a little off and the OK becomes O-kay. And she never says anything else except OK. But there’s I think 50 different Okays. They each mean a different thing. It’s brilliant.

**John:** That’s great. And again in your script that probably is a good example of like a parenthetical where you’re going to have to put what is the actual shading of that OK in the situation.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yes. Great. Well that was a fun exercise. So let’s maybe try to do this again on some future occasion.

**Craig:** I would love to.

**John:** Because that was lovely to do.

Let’s do some questions. Matt from Massachusetts asks, “As I write a feature screenplay I am periodically trapped up by a vestigial thought from my novel writing days about first person versus third person omniscient perspective. In a novel it’s pretty obvious. But do you ever think about this in terms of screenplays, particularly if they don’t have voiceover? If your main character is in a situation where they can’t possibly know something we have to decide whether or not to become omniscient and share that information with the viewer.”

Craig, what is your thinking about limited perspective and omniscience as you’re coming up with a story? And do you always have a plan from the start, or is it situational?

**Craig:** It’s situational. So you make choices about perspective all the time. And I think we’ve done, certainly we’ve done at least an episode about perspective as a specific tool in our tool belt. You want to know from whose perspective and there are choices. It’s either from a character’s perspective or it is from the omniscient camera’s perspective. And if it’s from the camera’s perspective the point is we’re going to see something that the people don’t. Or, that we are seeing something that is a shared perspective by a lot of people. A crowd scene for instance.

So, you want to choose those moments carefully. Typically the kind of omniscient we’re going to see something but nobody else will, it’s the bailiwick of mysteries, thrillers, twisty kind of things. They are associated with the dum-dum-dum kind of sound in your head. And it needs to be used carefully I think. A little goes a long way.

**John:** My daughter has started watching Criminal Intent. Not, Criminal Intent. She’s started watching one of the CBS procedurals that’s been on for like 20 years. And so she’s watching an episode from the first season and I was so surprised because it opens with this scene that’s from the point of view from none of the actual main characters of the show. And it basically shows the crime but hides who the killer was in the crime. And then the rest of the episode is trying to figure out who the killer was. And it’s just not a format that I’m used to at all. But it was a very common format for a long time in procedurals.

So, I agree with Craig that you’re going to be making choices based on the situation you’re going to find yourself in and sort of whether it’s going to be most effective for us as the audience to have information that the protagonist doesn’t have. You’re also going to make some fundamental choices about how your story is told. And so this thing I was writing the treatment on I had to very explicitly from the start say we are not cutting away to this villain’s point of view. This is not going to be a movie where we ever see what the villain is doing independent of the hero.

**Craig:** And you’re allowed to set those ground rules. Just know that if you are going to make a point of saying here’s a thing that someone doesn’t know but now I’m telling it to you, it will always threaten artifice. It disrupts our verisimilitude. Because life doesn’t work that way.

In life we have a perspective. It’s through our two eyes. That’s what we get. So, it’s a little artificial. It can be wonderful. It can also be slightly cheaty. It’s one of those things.

**John:** Yeah. 1917 which was a great movie from this past year had incredibly limited POV where you only follow those guys as they’re walking through the trenches and doing everything. That’s an extreme example. But Parasite also does limited POV. And it could have cutaway to any of those character’s perspective on what they thought was going on. And director and writers really figured out what would be the most effective way to tell their specific story.

**Craig:** Exactly. All right. MJ writes, “Last year I made it to the second round of Austin Film Festival.” I assume that’s the screenwriting contest portion of that. “And after receiving the feedback and making changes I felt that my script was ready to submit to my company as a prospective buyer.” Hmm, they have their own company? Maybe they mean another company. “After reading the submission agreement, which they make every submitter sign, I became wary of signing it. My fiancé’s dad is a lawyer. And he said he became unhinged after reading the agreement. There’s one section in particular that concerns us.” And I think what MJ is saying is this is the agreement with the Austin Film Festival? I don’t know. Or with the company?

**John:** So he’s submitting it to a company it looks like. And so the submission agreement had some clauses in it.

**Craig:** OK. So their submission agreement is the problem. “Section five in short states that any damages awarded through arbitration shall not exceed $10,000 for film or $40,000 for television series. I have two questions regarding this. One, is this sort of agreement common? Two, what’s the likelihood that I could be screwed over by signing something like this?”

John? You have a law degree. I mean—[laughs]

**John:** As a lawyer…so what I will say is from other folks that I’ve talked to, some places do have you sign submission agreements. They’re not absolutely all that uncommon. I’m not particularly freaked out by this. I think if you’re approaching everything from a defensive posture like oh my god they’re going to steal my stuff and take my work and it’s all going to be a disaster, you’re not going to have a very good, happy time in this industry.

So, submission agreements are there because the company is trying to protect themselves from claims that someone stole – that their movie was stolen. This blockbuster was actually based on this thing that I sent into the company. So that’s why companies have submission agreements. Studios have them. Other places have them. I’m not actually not worried about it.

But I would ask is the place you’re submitting to have they made movies? Have they actually done things that are out there in the world? If it’s just some person you’ve never heard of, then I don’t know that it’s worth signing any submission agreement because I’m not sure that they’re worth anything at all.

**Craig:** Yeah. And behind all this there is a legal concept called adhesion contract. And adhesion contract, it sort of describes a lot of the sort of boilerplate that we are confronted with all the time. For instance, terms of use. We’re constantly signing terms of use that we do not read. And adhesion contract is basically boilerplate language that has been defined by one party. It’s usually a party that is bigger and stronger. And is set up as a kind of hard and fast and unnegotiable gate through which a kind of lesser powerful party has to go through. You don’t have a choice. Sign this or piss off.

And when you do have an adhesion contract there is a possibility that a court – let’s say this company did somehow do something damaging to you then a court would say, yeah, the fact that this poor writer had to sign your dumb agreement does not mean that it’s actually enforceable to the extent that you wish it would be.

That’s something that a lawyer would have to go through. And it’s not anything I think that anybody could ever count on. But just be aware that that is a concept in law. So, we’re held I guess to the standards of these boilerplate definitions maybe not quite as strongly as we think we are.

**John:** Yeah. So I think I’m speaking for both of us saying I’m not especially worried about this thing, but just any place you’re sending this to just keep an eye out for are they really a reputable place.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. And, I mean, just remember that some of these things are signs of who they are. You know? Are they worried that people are going to be suing – have other people sued them? Is that why this is in there? Because they’ve…

By and large, again, you know, our position is people aren’t really actively ripping other people off actively. But there are a lot of bad actors in the world who do fuzzy – that gray area stuff. That’s where it gets gross. And if they’re all wired up on avoiding lawsuits and going to arbitration and limiting damages it makes me wonder why. So, anyway, something – food for thought.

**John:** Food for thought. Justin in Pasadena writes, “If a writers strike does end up happening, what advice can you give to us non-WGA writers? Are there any unique opportunities we should know about? Or might there be some workarounds we should use to our advantage? And, of course, how can we not step on any toes in the process?”

So prefacing all of this by saying we can talk through hypotheticals about a writers strike, but there’s nothing saying that’s going to happen. But Craig you and I were both around in the 2008 strike and I remember we both interacted with some folks who were not WGA members who were coming out to the picket lines and stuff like that, too. So, let’s talk through at least what we remember from the 2007-2008 strike.

**Craig:** Sure. Well, just as a matter of law, if you’re not a member of the Writers Guild, and the Writers Guild is on strike, that means there’s no current contract between the companies and the union. And you can certainly legally work for them. There used to be a thing, and maybe it’s still there, when you apply for a membership to the Writers Guild it says, “Did you work during the strike?” And you’re supposed to say “yeah I did” if you did. And then they in theory could kind of imply that you can never be a member here, but they’re actually not allowed to do that at all. I remember that came up in a boardroom discussion.

But that’s the legal reality. The ethical reality is, you know, the world does not look kindly on replacement players. Because what you’re doing is making it harder for the union to end the strike and ideally to end the strike in favor of the union that you want to want to be part of. Because one thing is for sure, Justin. The strike will end. And when it ends then you’re going to want to be part of that union. And you’re going to want to be part of a union that has made the best possible deal for its members. So, the question is were you making that easier or harder to do by taking this replacement writer job?

And also what do you think the companies are going to be paying you? Do they think they’re going to be paying you union stuff? You’re not going to be getting pension. You’re not going to be getting health. You’re not going to be getting residuals. You’re not going to be getting credit protections. So, do you want to know how to not step on any toes in the process, don’t take those jobs.

**John:** Yeah. Don’t take those jobs. I would also say back in 2008 it was sort of hard to find screenwriters and actually talk with them. And so one of the nice things about picketing, maybe the only nice thing about picketing is you got to meet a lot of other people. And so I got to meet a lot of other writers who I’d only sort of seen their credits. But I also got to meet a lot of writers who were not yet WGA members who’d come out at Paramount at 6:30 in the morning when I was picketing there. And I would talk to them as we walked in small circles. And some of them have gone on to become brand name writers in this industry.

So, it was a chance to be out there and talk with folks. But that was 2008. This is not 2008. I mean, there’s so many more opportunities to meet writers in person.

**Craig:** Way more.

**John:** Now than there ever were before. So that’s not a good cause for a work stoppage. Hopefully the situation will not come up at all, but if it were to come up I agree with Craig. You’re doing yourself and no one any favors by looking at this as an opportunity for you to advance your career.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s pretty shortsighted. I have a side question. I mean, what is the value of the actual act of picketing for us? I’ve always wondered this. Traditionally the point of a picket line would be to picket the institution you were striking against. A factory. A hospital. A hotel. And then if scabs were coming into work they would have to go through the picket line and the people picketing would go “boo” and shame them. But just make it hard for other unions – so a lot of unions, we’re respecting the picket line. We’re not going through. We don’t really have that ability. It’s not like the trucks stopped rolling into these lots, or anybody else stopped rolling into the lots. We wouldn’t even picket every single thing.

In our circumstance, isn’t the best tool we have to just not work? I’m just curious. What do we get from the picketing other than the kind of meeting other writers and getting exercise, which for us honestly as a group super important?

**John:** I would say, top of my head I would say visibility just to make it clear that this is an actual thing that’s happened. Something that news cameras can point out is kind of useful. A reminder that a thing is actually happening so that people who work inside a studio on a daily basis can see like, oh that’s right, this is actually a thing that’s happening, even if they’re not in a development role. If they’re an accountant they say like, ah, this is a thing that’s happening. So that the president of the studio has to drive past that picket line every day is not probably a great thing for them.

But I think there’s also an aspect of solidarity and just sort of – because what is different about a person who is working on a factory line is that they see their coworkers every day. Screenwriters don’t see each other every day. I mean, TV writers do see each other every day. And so there is probably a solidarity and we’re all in this together thing which is I’m guessing important about picketing classically. But I think it’s fair to ask. This is a different time now than 20 years ago. Things do change.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m just kind of curious if there’s some other less industrial revolution way of doing this. Because I don’t perceive that in the 2007-2008 strike that the act of picketing itself had a dramatic impact on what we did. I could be wildly wrong on that. There’s a certain performative aspect to it that I’m just wondering. Like is there something better? I guess really I’m not saying don’t do something, but rather is there a better version or a more impactful modern version?

**John:** If you have thoughts about that as listeners you can write in and tell us what you think.

**Craig:** Neo-picketing. What would it look like?

**John:** All right. It is time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is this website called Travel Time. And so often with Google Maps and other things you can figure out how long it will take you to get from point A to point B. So like from my house to Disney, how long will it take for me to get there as I’m getting my picketing sign ready to march there? This is the opposite of that. So this basically says given a certain amount of time from a certain location how far could you get. This is based on usual traffic or how transit lines work. And it’s really fascinating to look at different cities and say like, OK, from the center of London in one hour I can get through to basically anywhere in London. Center of Los Angeles, how far can I get to somewhere in the Los Angeles region? And it’s disappointingly small in number.

**Craig:** Well, I would love to see how far you can get in London in one hour, because I feel like there was one point where I think I went three blocks in an hour.

**John:** Oh, certainly not driving. But like through the Tube and other ways.

**Craig:** Through the Tube, yes. Or walking even, yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Walking. So it’s an interesting way of comparing cities and sort of the choices cities have made. Also just how geography sometimes constrains the ability of cities to function certain ways.

**Craig:** That sounds excellent. I love any tool that makes traveling easier. I have to travel a lot more than I ever thought I would. And so I’ve become like super fussy about making it easier for myself.

My One Cool Thing is another person. So I think two weeks in a row that my One Cool Thing is a person. And this is slightly political. Not even slightly. It’s completely political. My One Cool Thing this week is a man named Mark Kelly. Mark Kelly is running for the Senate in Arizona. He’s the Democratic Party candidate for the Senate in Arizona. This is going to be a special election because of the death of John McCain. So when John McCain died the Governor of Arizona appointed Republican Martha McSally who is not good.

And so Mark Kelly is running. Mark Kelly, I’ve met him, he is fascinating. He is a former astronaut. And he is a combat veteran as well with the navy. And he is also the husband of Gabby Giffords, who was the former congresswoman from Arizona until she was shot by a deranged gunman. And, you know, went through traumatic brain injury. And he’s had one hell of a life.

And he is just a remarkably decent guy and kind of a reminder that there are still these wonderfully principled people who have dedicated their lives to this country. And who have also suffered personally because of the way some of our laws work in this country and have not given up. If anything else they have tripled down and said I want to fix it. And sometimes there are days when I think I don’t want to be here anymore. [laughs] And then I look at – and I talk to a guy like Mark Kelly who says of course you do. And we fix it. That’s what we do.

So my One Cool Thing this week is Mark Kelly. And, of course, if you want to – he doesn’t do PACs or anything like that. He’s just taking personal donations. So if you want to donate to him just look up I think – what’s the website? Think Blue? Act Blue?

**John:** Act Blue.

**Craig:** Act Blue. Think Blue is the Dodgers slogan. Sorry. Act Blue is the header organization that collects individual donations for democratic candidates. And you can Google up Mark Kelly and find his Act Blue site and make a donation if you so desire.

**John:** Fantastic. We’ll have a link in the show notes to that as well. Stick around after the credits because we will be talking much more politics. But for now, Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao with production assistance this week by Stuart Friedel and Dustin Bocks. It was edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is again by James Launch and Jim Bond.

If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. In those show notes you’ll have the links to all the clips that we used. Thank you to the people who put that stuff online. That’s great. It helps us figure out how people talk in real life.

You’ll find the transcript for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. We get them usually within the week the episode airs. And remember you can sign up to become a Premium member of Scriptnotes at Scriptnotes.net. That gets you all the back episodes and the bonus segments like the one we’re going to do right now. Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** Craig, more politics.

**Craig:** Oh goodie.

**John:** Oh goodie. Good stuff. So, here’s a thing that I’ve been doing recently, and I think this was a suggestion from Jon Lovett on Pod Save America. Is when someone says, “Oh, you know Trump is going to get reelected,” the response should be what are you doing today to stop that.

**Craig:** Love that.

**John:** Basically to throw that back at it. So, on my daily to do list I have this sort of quarter sheet that I use as my to-do list of what I’m going to do every day. And at breakfast I fill it out. I have a new entry in there and it’s Defeat Trump. And every day I have to do something that will actually advance that goal. And so generally it is donating to political candidates, but sometimes it’s actually reading up about things. It’s filling out my California ballot. It’s researching sort of who I want in certain offices. So, I’m trying to do something every day to make sure that I don’t wake up a year from now in an actual fascist nation.

**Craig:** Well I think that’s a great plan. Have you considered somehow destroying the orange makeup factory? How deep do you go?

Yes, I also do not want to – look, I think we are actually every day waking up in a country that is – I’m not going to be an alarmist and say that we are currently living in a fascist state. But we are living in something that is in between what we were and a fascist state.

**John:** Yeah. It’s trending in a bad direction.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. And particularly this latest thing. I mean, the wall between the Justice Department and the White House has always been a kind of necessary check and balance to power. It’s gone. That is terrifying. And the rule of law is breaking down. And one of the reasons why it’s just as important to me that if you have to put all your money on one bet, and it’s a proposition bet, yes or no, you’re always going to be incurring a lot of risk, even if the odds are in your favor you’re incurring risk. So, if the big bet is get rid of Trump that is incurring risk that you will fail.

What you do to hedge that is actively support people who are running for the Senate in particular. I don’t think the makeup of the House of Representatives is going to change dramatically. I think if anything it will even get better, I hope, in terms of people who are opposed to Trump. If the Senate can swing over and be opposed to Trump that is a big deal. Then it is a different situation. It is a wildly different situation.

So, I’m working on that as well. But I think that you’re right. People who sit there and go, “Well you know…” Look, no. Because, OK, fine, then what are we supposed to do? Just curl up and die? I mean, you fight. You rage, rage against the dying of the light.

**John:** Yes. I think back to the special episode we recorded right after Trump was elected called Everything is Going to be OK.

**Craig:** Is it? Were we right?

**John:** But here’s what I’ll say. The fear I was feeling at that moment was so intense. And I sort of thought we would get to this place that we’re at right now. I thought we would get there within a few weeks. And so I guess I was surprised that it’s actually taken this long to do it and the sort of level of incompetence with evil is sort of what’s taken so long to do that.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** That Stephen Miller didn’t know how to do all the terrible things he wanted to do so clearly.

**Craig:** Ted Cruz would have done way more damage by now.

**John:** Oh yeah. Absolutely. So I can take some comfort in that and also in the great successes that happened in the 2018 elections where you saw like, oh, people will actually show up and vote the smart people in. So that gives me a lot of hope.

What’s been frustrating I would say, especially the last three weeks, is looking at the Democratic primaries and the degree to which the people who should be most outraged about what’s happening, the Justice Department things, are directing all of their vitriol at Democratic candidates, which is ridiculous and pointless.

**Craig:** So stupid.

**John:** Let me stipulate, the Democratic nominee is very likely going to be Jewish, gay, or a woman.

**Craig:** Good lord.

**John:** Almost a guarantee. Unless Biden somehow magically pulls out, it’s going to be one of those three things.

**Craig:** That’s awesome.

**John:** But it’s true though, right?

**Craig:** Yeah, it does seem – well, the one thing I will say–

**John:** Oh, Bloomberg.

**Craig:** Yeah. And Biden, we are pretty early. So we’re going to run into these other states. We don’t know.

**John:** Or it’s going to either be–

**Craig:** Old.

**John:** It’s either going to be Jewish, gay, woman, or it’s going to be Joe Biden.

**Craig:** Yes. Correct.

**John:** So we have to be prepared for those scenarios. And in preparing for those scenarios let’s be more mindful about the things we are saying about those groups and Joe Biden, because that may be who we are running. So you and I recorded a segment we actually snipped out of the show because it was just goodbye mentions where I ranted about sort of the homophobia and sort of antigay stuff I was seeing being directed towards Pete Buttigieg which was really happening. And I was so frustrated that it was from these people who claim to be giant liberal supporters and that I wasn’t seeing it being called out.

You could say the same about the sexism. You could say the same about anti-Bidenism. Whatever you want to call that.

**Craig:** Antisemitism appears to be missing, which is I guess good? I mean, it is good. Of course it’s good. It’s just kind of curious.

**John:** If we end up with Sanders as the nominee–

**Craig:** Then it will come roaring back.

**John:** It’ll come roaring back and it’s going to be harder to claim the moral high ground when you went after the gay guy fine, you went after the woman fine. So, let’s just, I mean, let’s all be better.

**Craig:** I know. I’m bracing for that. I never forget like how – well, I do. Sometimes I forget. And then America reminds me how many people in America just hate Jewish people and believe that they’re some sort of weird devils in charge of everything. And so I’m bracing for that. If Bernie Sanders is the nominee I just feel like oh boy here we go. Which is a very – you know, it’s a pretty Jewish thing of me think. It’s the way we are.

But, I have been so just – I guess like a dum-dum, just simply focused on doing what needs to be done to get rid of Trump, and I’m happy to make positive arguments, and I could I think make positive arguments for all of those candidates. Maybe not Mike Bloomberg. But all the other ones. But the idea of tearing any of them down right now seems virtually insane.

**John:** Yeah. It does.

**Craig:** What? What? I mean, love who you love. It’s a little bit like my attitude towards movies and television. Like I talk about the things that I love because I think that’s where you actually get the most information. I mean, when they attack each other I feel sick right now, truly sick, in a way I never did before because I just think like, no, we can’t – we can’t. My god.

**John:** We can’t slice each other up over really what are minor differences in what we’re trying to do. The idea that this candidate who is not as progressive or this candidate who is more progressive is going to destroy everything if they become elected is a tremendous fallacy. And so dangerous and so feeds into exactly what the disinformation campaigns are hoping for, where you can’t even tell who are the bots and who are the people who just aren’t thinking this through very well.

**Craig:** Yeah. And, look, we know that social media is designed to amplify the extremes. It’s just what it does. Because the only way to rise above a kind of large averaged point of view is to be extreme. And then by getting amplified the extremes begin to pull more people to the extremes.

You want to know who I want to vote for? Whoever is running against Donald Trump.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** That’s who I want to vote for.

**John:** And I do like that the candidates will repeatedly say that. They’ll say after each primary they’ll say of course we’re going to support whoever. That’s great. But I think it’s also a good moment to call out like and don’t be assholes to everyone else online because we need everybody here and we need to all be rowing in the same direction.

**Craig:** All hands on deck. All hands on deck. And, look, do I have a preference right now? I mean, I have some. Because, look, California we don’t have to vote just yet. So, I’ve been thinking about it because I don’t feel a great need to decide in this moment right now and commit to a team and be Team Blank or Team Blank. I’m just thinking about it and reading. And that’s how that’s going to go. But I will say that the argument that we have to vote for A or you cannot vote for B because they can’t beat Trump is horseshit.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** Every single one of these candidates can beat Donald Trump. Every single one of them. I believe that at the bottom of my heart. Anybody that says Bernie Sanders can’t beat Donald Trump is nuts. And anybody that says that Pete Buttigieg can’t beat Donald Trump is nuts. And the same for Amy Klobuchar and the same for Joe Biden. And by the way, the same even for Mike Bloomberg. Honestly I do believe that in the end what’s going to happen is the great majority of people are going to be voting against Donald Trump.

**John:** Yep. It has to happen.

**Craig:** Let’s not cripple our candidate before they get in there. Let’s not hobble them, you know.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s look at these as competitors for that spot, but not as opponents. Not as villains. We are trying to pick who it is that we think can run this race the best. But that does not mean that we are going to cede any ground to the person who is already in that office.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, look, I think that because I believe that all of them are capable of beating Donald Trump, then I can also actually then I who would I like to be president of these people. Who would be my preferred candidate? And there are all sorts of reasons to say one or the other. But my god the thought of going out there and saying something cruel about another one of these candidates, I mean, at times I lose my patience with the supporters of a certain candidate because they just are, you know, a handful.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But that’s not going to translate to me tearing that candidate down.

**John:** 100%. And I will knock on doors for whoever that person is who is running against Donald Trump.

**Craig:** Yeah. Absolutely. I will donate the maximum amount that I can as an individual. I presume that my wife will as well. And, yeah, I’ll knock on doors and I’ll do what I have to do. I think we’ll all just line up. I mean, that’s the thing. We have to line up and do what needs to be done. And accept that there is no perfect answer. There’s just a better answer. So can we please just choose our better answer with respect for each other and advocate as hard as we can? And I could be wrong, but again with the exception of Mayor Bloomberg who I’m a little concerned about, which is fair, I’m allowed to be concerned, I don’t think that any of the candidates pose an existential threat in the way that Donald Trump does to everyone. But particularly Donald Trump poses an existential threat to immigrants, to people of color, to trans people. Generally to LGBTQ people, I think. And to journalists. And to the law.

Now, what else do I need to say?

**John:** To the notion of democracy. Yes.

**Craig:** Correct. To our existence. It is an existential threat to us and our standing in the world and our place in the world and our future. And in the end – oh, I forgot the biggest one – to our ability to live on this planet.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because he is not helping solve the coming climate crisis. He’s like how can we speed it up.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** So really we’re going to tear down any of these candidates while we’re – here comes a car. The car is about to hit you. Who would you like to stop that person in the car? Only this person, no one else.

**John:** No one else.

**Craig:** OK. So what if that person, you don’t get that person? Then I’m getting run over. O-kay. Cool. Cool man. Cool. Good for you.

**John:** Good plan. Craig, thanks.

**Craig:** Thanks John.

**John:** Bye.

* [Victory for both partnered Irish election opponents](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/10/irish-election-couple-who-ran-against-each-other-social-democrats-fianna-fail-both-get-elected) we discussed in [episode 436](https://johnaugust.com/2020/political-movies)
* [Scriptnotes, episode 241](https://johnaugust.com/2016/fan-fiction-and-ghost-taxis), in which John predicts Parasite
* [Assistants’ Advice to Showrunners](https://johnaugust.com/2020/assistants-advice-to-showrunners)
* [Mythic Quest](https://tv.apple.com/us/show/mythic-quest-ravens-banquet/umc.cmc.1nfdfd5zlk05fo1bwwetzldy3) on Apple TV+
* [California Penal Code 632](https://www.wklaw.com/practice-areas/eavesdropping-penal-code-section-632/) and the legality of eavesdropping
* [Scriptnotes, episode 433](https://johnaugust.com/2020/the-one-with-greta-gerwig) with Greta Gerwig
* [Appalachian English](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03iwAY4KlIU&feature=youtu.be) from Mountain Talk
* The Austin History Center’s [accounts from visitors](https://soundcloud.com/austinhistorycenter/ahc-3303-klempner-cindy) and an [interview with architect Tom Hatch](https://soundcloud.com/austinhistorycenter/ahc-3341-hatch-tom-20180502a-clip2)
* Ben Platt on [Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang](https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/las-culturistas/e/65248782?autoplay=true)
* [Fck Work But Ima Go, episode 404](https://anchor.fm/fckworkpodcast/episodes/Ep–404—Is-You-Gone-Help-or-Micromanage-eao8pe/a-a1ebg8f)
* Key & Peele’s [OK (uncensored)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pufATqebv8)
* [Scriptnotes, episode 45](https://johnaugust.com/2012/setting-perspective-and-terrible-numbers), in which we discuss perspective
* [Adhesion contracts](https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/adhesion_contract_(contract_of_adhesion))
* [Travel Time](https://app.traveltimeplatform.com/search/0_lat=34.05513&0_lng=-118.25703&0_title=Los%20Angeles%2C%20CA%2C%20USA&0_tt=90)
* [Mark Kelly](https://markkelly.com/) is running for Senate in Arizona
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by James Llonch ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/438standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/political-movies).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 436 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast it’s a new installment of How Would This Be a Movie, where we take a look at stories in the news and figure out how they can become entertainment, because real life is deeply unsettling, and even in circumstances where someone’s guilt is incontrovertibly established traditional rules of not just storytelling but actual democracy are shattered one after the other making you wonder whether anything actually matters. And if there’s even going to be an election in November, which is why we retreat to what-if scenarios and imagine a world in which choices have consequences, and the bad guys sometimes lose.

To do so we have a special guest this week. Liz Hannah—

**Liz Hannah:** No pressure.

**John:** She is a writer whose credits include The Post, Long Shot, and the upcoming All the Bright Places. Welcome back, Liz.

**Liz:** Thanks guys.

**Craig:** Welcome back, Liz. Third time?

**Liz:** Third time. Need the jacket.

**Craig:** You got the jacket. We have a burgundy jacket for you.

**Liz:** Oh, that’s nice.

**Craig:** At five. It’s gold-stripe.

**Liz:** Oh wow.

**John:** Later on we give scarves. There’s a whole sort of Scriptnotes wardrobe.

**Liz:** I was like do you start with like a jean jacket, then you get to a leather jacket?

**Craig:** All of it from Goodwill.

**Liz:** Great.

**Craig:** Rest assured, someone died in that jacket.

**Liz:** If it’s XXXL, that’s exactly the way I want it.

**Craig:** At minimum.

**Liz:** Yes, obviously. Either that or like petite.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** That’s how it works.

**Liz:** Those are the ranges.

**Craig:** From a child.

**Liz:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** And if you’re a Premium member stick around because at the end of the show there will be a bonus segment, and Liz hopefully you’ll stick around for this, too. I would like to talk about books and what it’s OK to do in or with a book. So, are you allowed to dog your pages? Are you allowed to markup books? What is permissible to do with an actual physical book?

**Craig:** That will be our bonus topic?

**John:** Bonus topic.

**Craig:** Great.

**Liz:** Great.

**John:** All right. Craig Mazin, you just won a WGA award.

**Craig:** I sure did. I can only imagine how frustrating that must have been for some of the people from the guild that were there. I realized when I walked in, because I ran into Sally Burmester who is the kind of second in command of the credits department who I’ve had a lot of years working with, and then just some other people that I know from the guild that I’ve always been very friendly with. And I had such a nice hugs and all the rest of it. And then I realized like there’s only really two kinds of people that work at the guild. People that are like, yay, but then most of them who are like you son of a bitch. So, I was like–

**Liz:** Do you feel like it’s just the guild that feels that way about you?

**Craig:** No, no, obviously the rest of the world. I’m aware of my polarizing nature.

**John:** Well congratulations on another award for Chernobyl.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** So there’s very few awards left, but it’s been a good run.

**Craig:** It’s been a great run. And honestly because we all love each other – I feel like there are probably shows that do, or movies that do really well where there’s a lot of enmity between people. I think there was like something in the air when was it 12 Years a Slave, when that movie won? There was like the writer and the director didn’t like each other. There was something in the air. We all love each other. All of us. Like everybody. So when all these things, like Johan Renck won the DGA award last weekend. So, we were loving on him. And our production designers won. And our sound people won. And so everybody sends each other these lovey-dovey emails. And I’m, you know, that part is wonderful. We all actually like each other so we’re happy.

**Liz:** Such a rarity.

**Craig:** I think it is.

**Liz:** It is.

**Craig:** I think it legitimately is. Ah, if people could see the misery that goes on. But, yeah, it’s been great. And I’m very grateful. And the Writers Guild, you know, my relationship with the Writers Guild is complicated in that I’m always kind of just a fuse-budgety policy questioner, but obviously a loyal member of the guild for a quarter of a century. And, you know, that award last night actually was emotional. It was nice.

**Liz:** It’s really nice to be in a room with other writers. And it’s nice to be recognized by your peers who you respect and who you are either internally or externally competing with. You know, you’re all trying to make each other better, or be better than somebody else. And so to be recognized like that I think is really wonderful.

**John:** Yeah. Some news and some follow up before we get to our main topics. My third book, Arlo Finch, comes out Tuesday, the day this episode drops.

**Craig:** I’m looking at it.

**John:** So Arlo Finch in the Kingdom of Shadows is the third book in the installment.

**Craig:** OK. I just want to describe for people–

**John:** Describe it.

**Craig:** So Arlo Finch and his friends are staring into what appears to be two centurions, but statues with wings, but the wings are it looks like stone. And it’s like but the centurion statue stone goliaths are facing each other and in between them is a crevice of light.

**John:** Fair.

**Craig:** And something good or bad is coming out of it. And you know what I feel? I feel like they’re about to leave something and enter something new.

**John:** That is absolutely true and accurate. They are headed into the world beyond the woods. The realm.

**Craig:** Yes. The Kingdom of Shadows.

**John:** Yes. That is in fact the Kingdom of Shadows. All three books have an “in the” thing. It’s all geographically based.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So “in the Valley of Fire,” “in the Lake of the Moon,” and now “in the Kingdom of Shadows.” It is actually truly a trilogy. This last week I put out a long medium post which you can read about the experience of writing a trilogy, because as screenwriters we always write like one movie. And it was really cool to actually get the chance to write the whole trilogy and do the whole thing. But unlike your Chernobyl experience where you could plan out the whole series in advance, I really kind of couldn’t do that. And so one of the things I wanted to get into in this post is the degree to which you can make a plan but there’s just a lot of discovery along the way. And the villain of this series was not the villain who I thought was going to be the real villain as I started writing the first book.

**Craig:** The real villain I presume is capitalism.

**John:** It is capitalism. [laughs] It’s funny how it all comes back to that.

**Craig:** I’m in a Bernie State of Mind.

**John:** If you want to come see me and get your book signed I’m doing an event at Chevaliers on Larchmont this Sunday at 2pm.

**Liz:** Love that bookstore.

**John:** So good.

**Craig:** I do want to read this blurb on the back of the book. It’s pretty amazing. This is Ransom Riggs who is a number one New York Times bestselling author of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, a book that my children both read, and thus I read and loved. And he writes, god I hope Ransom Riggs is a man, because I just said he writes.

**John:** He does. He is a man and he does write.

**Craig:** It could be – Ransom is a gender-neutral name.

**Liz:** That’s true. It’s sort of a human-neutral name.

**Craig:** It’s human-neutral. It’s actually a word. It’s a noun. Ransom Riggs says, “John August is a master storyteller.” That’s pretty impressive.

**John:** It’s nice. Yeah.

**Craig:** Master.

**John:** Yeah. I got some good reviews on this.

**Craig:** Yeah man. That’s awesome. Congratulations.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Are you going to do another one by the way? Not another one of these, but another thing?

**John:** At some point.

**Liz:** A book series.

**John:** Well, at least a book. I don’t think I would do another series right away. It was a lot to undertake right at the start and it was kind of foolish in a way, just because to do a book a year is just a huge commitment.

**Craig:** Derek Haas does a book a minute.

**John:** He does a book a minute.

**Liz:** That’s right. He does.

**John:** And his books are ultimately a series, but they’re not a trilogy in that way. Like it’s another installment. This was a lot.

**Craig:** I wish I had – so our friend, Derek Haas, who does all the Chicago shows, Chicago Fire, all the rest of it, has more confidence as a writer than anybody I know. And because of that he’s free, like he doesn’t do that thing that I’m always doing which is just going, “You know what? I suck. And actually today would be best spent playing a videogame.” He doesn’t do that.

**Liz:** Oh, that’s every day.

**Craig:** Yeah. Right.

**Liz:** Every day opening the computer, and particularly when it’s a blank page you’re like, no, not good enough for that. Just no.

**Craig:** No, I can’t. Derek is like, “Awesome, blank page. Let’s fill it. Woo!”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** God, I wish I had that.

**John:** He gets up at five in the morning and just does it.

**Craig:** He gets up at five in the morning. I go to bed at five in the morning because my mind won’t shut up. Ugh.

**Liz:** I had to open a blank page on Thursday. I was writing an outline for something and it was luckily like the 15th draft of it that I had been doing, or 15th break of it, and so had kind of an idea of where I was going. But man opening that blank page, even knowing like I’ve got the notes, I know where I’m supposed to head, I was just like there’s so much more interesting things happening on Twitter right now. Or Instagram. Or The New York Times. Or quite literally anything else possible.

**Craig:** Anything. Can I tell you also as I get older there’s this new thing that’s been happening – I don’t’ know if you experience this, John, because we’re older than you, Liz. I’ll start a new project. It’s the beginning. I look at it and I go, “My god, am I still doing this?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh my god. Have I gotten nowhere? [laughs] You just realize that you’ve been driving a car in a circle forever.

**Liz:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you’re like I have to do this again? Here we go.

**Liz:** My favorite thing is to revise my title page.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s a classic.

**Liz:** I’m really into that.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**Liz:** I’m like, um, is this where you put – is it centered? Is this the font that I want to use for the title? What are the other title pages I’ve used for other movies I’ve written? And then you go down that wormhole. Maybe I’ll just read this. We’ll see–

**Craig:** I’ve got a new thing for you if you want. This is my new jam. So I’m adapting this thing that’s based on another existing work. And that existing work has a very specific font it uses. So I’m like, oh, I’ll use that font for the title page. Well, that font was specifically for that thing. But then other people have made similar. So now I’m on a font hunt.

**Liz:** Yeah.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Oh, font hunt. That was so much fun. And then you get to download the font and install the font. But that’s a day. You’re exhausted.

**Liz:** I was doing a look book for something recently and really got into the font world. And I was like, you know, I really think I want this to look like a neon sign. Guess how many neon sign fonts there are?

**John:** 700.

**Craig:** 4,000.

**Liz:** A million. Just a million.

**Craig:** There we go. I knew it.

**Liz:** And so then you’re like what color is it if I’m doing this in neon sign?

**Craig:** Right.

**Liz:** It was a great day. It was a great day.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s a good day.

**John:** And really when you’re being paid a daily rate to do this, well, my pages aren’t done yet but I did fit the font for the–

**Craig:** What we’re saying is their nightmare come true.

**Liz:** Actually every producer listening to this right now is like, “Ugh, that was why it was on Tuesday and not Wednesday.”

**Craig:** Exactly. “Because of the font? You piece of shit.” [laughs] What can we do? We’re humans. We can only do what we can do, unless we’re Derek Haas.

**John:** A script from this past year which did use a custom font on its title page–

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Was Knives Out. And we talked about Knives Out in Episode 436. I got a bit of follow up here. It says, “John and Craig, you guys were talking about the specificity in scripts and referenced the Knives Out script. I was excited to read it but I noticed there was very little if any description given to the characters. Starting on page one with Fran and then within the first three pages Marta, Mom, and Alice are also introduced, but Marta was the only character with any description whatsoever. And this description was only given as 20s. I’d have to believe that if this was a three-pager sent in by an unknown you would have mentioned that and Craig would have had some umbrage.”

**Craig:** Yes. I would have.

**John:** “So is this because the script is written by an established writer, or it’s a style that some writers can either do or not do as long as it’s consistent?”

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Tell us what you think, Craig?

**Craig:** Rian Johnson was writing a script for himself to direct.

**Liz:** That’s what I was going to say.

**Craig:** So there’s no question that when it was time to cast, I mean, well first of all that movie is cast almost exclusively with stars. Well-known actors. Meaning there wasn’t going to be an audition process as much as we think this kind of person – I imagine this sort of person, this sort of person. For those actors when the script was sent without question Rian must have included – I mean, I’ll ask him – but he must have included, or just called them and said, “This is who you are. This is what you look like. This is how I see it.” But there was no reason for him to put all that in there because all it would do would be to limit the description for the actors that would be reading it. So he could tailor that to them.

Yes, if he were not directing it, or if there were any chance that anybody else would be working on it, or that there would be a lot of open auditions then, yeah, no, he would have to do something.

**John:** He’d write, “Ruggedly handsome, but doesn’t know it.” Or any of those classic things.

**Craig:** Papa doesn’t know it. Ruggedly handsome but doesn’t know it.

**Liz:** She’s the girl next door, but…”

**Craig:** But.

**Liz:** But.

**Craig:** But. Yeah. Exactly. Because the girl next door sucks.

**Liz:** Yeah, exactly. She looks great without her glasses on.

**Craig:** Oh, yes, the glasses.

**Liz:** That’s my favorite. I’m also wearing glasses right now ironically. So there you go.

**Craig:** Wait, take them off. Let’s see what happens.

**Liz:** Well, it’s like Clark Kent. I can’t.

**Craig:** Of course. Wait, oh my god. Liz Hannah is–

**John:** Superman.

**Craig:** Superman. She’s Superman.

**Liz:** Obviously.

**John:** That’s a good disguise. I was talking with a friend of the show, I had lunch with her a week ago, and she was talking about the process of going out to a major star and so the character is written a certain way in the script but you also write a top page letter that sort of says this is why this is the role for you. And that’s a whole process we should talk about in a future episode, because it’s a very specific thing that happens.

**Craig:** Yes. I did those. I did those. They’re nerve-wracking. I don’t like doing them.

**Liz:** It’s horrifying. You do it for directors, too. You know, like if you’re trying to attach somebody and why is it you and why is it that person and blah-blah-blah. And then when they pass 12 times then you really just get to the letter and you’re like this letter isn’t good. This is why they’re passing.

**Craig:** Also I feel like, oh my god, I’m just – if they say yes I feel like I just sold somebody—

**Liz:** A really bad [crosstalk]–

**Craig:** Like a defective product. Yeah. But that’s me and that’s my sad brain.

**John:** Craig, some shocking and sad news this past week. MoviePass fell to zero. The stock fell to zero. So it had ceased operations in September. We had talked about MoviePass over the past two or three years.

**Craig:** MoviePassed.

**John:** MoviePassed. Craig, any surprises? Any last words for MoviePass?

**Craig:** The surprise was that it took this long. It’s actually amazing how long a venture with no logical prospect for success can actually last. Neither you nor I are business geniuses, but we saw fairly clearly what I think a lot of business geniuses just did not want to see. Which is that that was just not a functioning workable concept. And hopefully people will learn their lesson. But they won’t. Because capitalism is the villain, man.

**John:** Since this is probably the last time we’ll ever talk about MoviePass–

**Liz:** Fingers crossed.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I want to say that I think there is something underlying the idea in terms of like encouraging people to go see movies at theaters which was a good thing that happened for a short period of time. And so I was talking with Megana, our producer, and she was saying like it was kind of great for a while because it made going to movies with your friends so cheap that they went to more movies.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** And that’s a good thing. So, if the movie theater chains themselves, or other people who actually have a financial interest and an understanding of how movies work could bolster that kind of frequent movie-going I think that’s only to the betterment of everybody.

**Liz:** I agree. I had friends who had it and the thing was that they wouldn’t just go see like Star Wars or whatever the big movie was. They were like well because we can go to the movies we’re going to go see anything that’s in the theater. So they would see small independent movies that like I didn’t even know were in theaters. And so I think that encouragement was really great. Because it’s not really the Star Wars of the world that need the butts in seats.

**John:** Exactly.

**Liz:** We’re all there.

**Craig:** We’re all there.

**Liz:** It’s the other movies that are getting the theatrical release that are really looking for the butts in seats. And so I agree. I think encouraging people to go to theaters is great. I think it just has to be sustainable in any form.

**Craig:** It was great for us. It was great for people that like movies to see as many movies as they wanted for the price of one movie. If restaurants did that more people would definitely eat out. And experience new foods. Unfortunately never could quite – I mean, remember there was that one point where they were like, “No, we’re playing three-dimensional chess. You don’t understand. We’re in the data business.” And for a moment I was like, oh, well, OK. Maybe I’m dumb and that’s a thing?

**John:** I don’t really get how Facebook works either, so maybe.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. But then I was like Facebook has ads. I can understand that. But what is MoviePass going to do with their data of people that go to movies? Really the only data they had was that people that were smart enough to take advantage of this insane thing. RIP MoviePass.

**John:** Yeah. The point you made, Liz, about sustainability I think is really crucial. Whenever you look at a bunch of money spilling into something it can stir stuff up. But like can it really build a sustainable business model out of things? And that’s always the question whenever I see venture capital coming into something I’m like, oh, are they going to ruin something and try to change it?

**Craig:** Yeah. The probably will.

**John:** They probably will. All right. Liz, you have just made a new movie, All the Bright Places. It is coming out on Netflix. What was the process of you getting this movie put together and making this movie? Because this is one of the – you were hands-on in actually making this movie. So talk to us about it.

**Liz:** Yeah. It started a while ago. Actually I think I started the first draft of it right after I sold The Post. So it was before we started shooting The Post. So this would have been 2016/2017. And it’s based on a book by Jennifer Niven called All the Bright Places. I got sent the book by my manager who is a producer on it. And Elle Fanning had been attached for a long time. I’ve known Elle for a long time. We wanted to work together. And I read this book and found it emotionally very moving, but also it dealt with things that we don’t always talk about really openly. I think we don’t always talk about mental health as openly as we can. And we don’t talk about tragedy and sort of trauma and how we recover from that, or don’t recover from that.

And it was also a story about teenagers, but it wasn’t a story just about teenagers. It was sort of when we talked about making the movie we were like let’s make a movie where the two leads happen to be 17, not a movie about them being 17.

**Craig:** Right.

**Liz:** And so I started a draft in 2016/2017. And then everybody was busy, couldn’t really find time. Couldn’t find the right director. And then I was doing rehearsals for Mindhunter in Pittsburgh in 2018 I guess, what year is it? No, yeah, 2018. And I got a call that this guy Brett Haley wanted to direct it. Brett had directed a movie Hearts Beat Loud, which was really wonderful and sweet. And he had read the script and everybody somehow was available. Like it’s one of those crazy things, like everybody had sort of six weeks to shoot this movie in two months. And so we all went to Cleveland and made this movie. And got really the wonderful weather of both steaming hot and icy cold winter.

**John:** That’s why Cleveland is such an in-demand filming spot is because of the climate and its accessibility to everyplace else you want to be.

**Liz:** Yeah. It was beautiful for us to shoot there. It gave us everything. The movie takes place in Indiana originally and so we were shooting Cleveland for Indiana.

**Craig:** That’s good enough. That’s close enough.

**Liz:** It was pretty close. But it was great. And Justice Smith is the co-lead. And he’s phenomenal. I had not seen him do work outside of Jurassic World and Pikachu and stuff like that. And what he did in this movie and what he and Elle did together was really phenomenal.

**John:** So as I was putting together the outline for this I was looking for the trailer for it. And so I find this trailer that’s Elle Fanning and some other dude and it was like a fan cut trailer from 2015.

**Liz:** Oh boy. Yeah.

**John:** And so it was crazy to me that like apparently right from when the book sold people were like, oh, this should be a movie and Elle Fanning should star in it. And it’s like the universe wanted this movie to exist.

**Liz:** The fans of the book are ravenous. They love this book. Jennifer Niven, again who is the author of the book, my cowriter on the screenplay, she just has this amazing fan base. I think because it’s real. And it’s also not talking down to teenagers. I think that was really, you know, when I grew up the movies I watched were like Say Anything and John Hughes movies that were not saying that your feelings that you’re having because you’re 17 are any dumber because you’re 17 when you’re having them. And I thought that was an important sort of thing to put out in the world.

I have two teenager half-siblings. I have a brother who is 18 and a sister who is 14. Making things for them I think is now something that I think about. And I don’t want them to watch something and be like, “You totally got it wrong because you’re old.” And I was like well that’s fair.

So, anyways, yeah, honestly Netflix came in and helped us make the movie. And they’ve been amazing partners. But it was a really interesting experience to just sort of have – actually what you were talking about with Chernobyl. It’s like we all kind of lived in Cleveland for eight weeks and became super close. And kind of making a movie with your friends about something you all feel so passionate about is really – I’ve never had something that was that kind of communal in a way.

**Craig:** And now how do you go back to the other way? Where you’re making a movie which is already a war and then you have more wars?

**Liz:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Which is brutal on you.

**Liz:** And if you don’t like the people you’re doing it with and you don’t – it’s funny, at the time that I was doing Bright Places I was talking to an actress-producer about doing another movie, about doing a movie together. And we were kind of just having big talks about what do we want to do, where are we at in our careers, and things like that. And both of us sort of right before, she made a little movie and I made Bright Places, and right before that we were both just so burned out and we were like, “I don’t know, man. Like I don’t know if we can do this. This just feels really hard. Maybe we should just take breaks.” Both of us were just kind of totally burned out.

And then she went and made this little movie with an ensemble cast where they all basically lived in a house together for six weeks. And I went and made this movie with a bunch of people and we basically all lived in a hotel together for eight weeks. And I called her when I got off and I was like, OK, I think I know how to do a movie again, because it’s like this is actually how you should do it, which is with people you love who are going to push you.

Brett and I, the director, got super close during filming. That does not mean that we didn’t fight and argue and disagree. But I think in good ways. You know, I think the writer/director relationship on set is super unique and super different from every project. It sometimes doesn’t exist. Sometimes the writer isn’t there. And I believe that’s very unfortunate because I think that relationship can really push the material and push the movie to be so much better.

**Craig:** It’s the best thing. When it works it’s the best. I mean, Johan and I would – we would have our disagreements, but even as we were having them we had this absolute confidence and faith that we would agree. At the end of the discussion agreement would happen. There was never this like paranoia that OK I’m just going to get rolled over.

**Liz:** Yeah.

**Craig:** On his part or on my part. We were just like we’ll figure it out. It’s cool. We figure things out. That’s what we do. And we’re going to be fine. And I’ve been in so many situations where that’s not even a question. There’s no availability for any kind of consensus because consensus is considered insulting to the director that they would have to even have consensus with the writer.

**Liz:** Yeah. Well, and I think you’re talking about the respect of it, too. Like the mutual respect. I have been super fortunate about the directors I’ve worked with. There’s been that mutual respect. But I’ve also been around and it hasn’t.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**Liz:** And obviously we all know those stories, or unfortunately been a part of those stories, but when you have the mutual respect where it’s like I’m not disagreeing with you because I just want to be right, I’m disagreeing with you because I think this might be a right way to go. And then you talk about it. And then you make a decision together about what the right way to go is. And I think there’s no – people I think get really afraid of stepping on other people’s toes or that as the writer you’re trying to encroach on the director and things like that. It’s like, no, I don’t really give a shit. I just want it to be good. And I don’t care who is right. It just has to be good.

**Craig:** They have no problem encroaching on the script.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I just see a whole like encroaching thing, I just laugh at.

**Liz:** It’s crazy. I mean, I’ve worked with producers who have never worked with onset writers before. And I’m like what do you think – I’m here to help. That’s what my job is on set as a writer. I’m just here to help. And with Bright Places we were really lucky. And Justice and Elle and Brett and I would just kind of like go over the script every morning. And we were rewriting every day to be better.

You know, I’ve been in situations, I’m sure we all have, where you’re rewriting it because you’re like we just have to have words. There’s no words. So we just need them. This was like we had the words, but we were just like let’s take a couple hours and make them better.

**Craig:** Lovely.

**Liz:** And it was a really lovely experience.

**Craig:** That is great. And correct me if I’m wrong, you now make a movie every 14 days. Is that right? You’ve got one in the theater every 14 days.

**Liz:** Yes.

**Craig:** You’re becoming very prolific. I have to say. You are.

**Liz:** Oh, no. That’s silly.

**Craig:** No, you are. This is exciting.

**Liz:** I appreciate it. Yeah, actually this year I’ll have two things out.

**Craig:** How about that? And last year how many did you have?

**Liz:** Two.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Liz:** Yeah. I do a movie and a TV show a year it sounds like.

**Craig:** I like that you were like I wrote this thing all the way back in like 2018. And like it’s taken almost a year for it be like…

There’s a movie that I’m hoping to get made at Universal that I wrote in 2014. And that was after it took Lindsay Doran and I, I think, seven years to get the rights to this book. I mean, so that’s fast.

**Liz:** Oh, no. It’s very fast.

**Craig:** You fast. You fast.

**Liz:** It’s very fast. I’m very lucky. I’ve had really great partners in this, too. I mean, I think that’s the other thing. Because I’ve written scripts that haven’t been made. And I’ve tried to get things made that haven’t gotten made, be in TV or in features. But I think the thing about the ones that get made, or sometimes they just don’t work. Sometimes it’s just not the right time. So it’s not anyone’s fault. But the ones that do work is because I have great partners on it who are willing to just do it. And I think that’s – there’s so much overthinking. There’s so much questioning. There’s so much doubt in all of it. I mean, just talking about the blank page. And when you’re kind of just like let’s go make a movie, or let’s go do this because it’s something we really care about—

**Craig:** That’s awesome.

**Liz:** You know, that’s what I’ve been really fortunate to do. And I’ve also – talking about this other conversation I was having about what I was going to do, you know, a movie to do next and stuff like that. I’ve also just like, you know, I’ve gotten to a place where I just don’t like making things with people I don’t like.

**John:** Oh yeah. It’s the luxury of some choice about who you’re working with. And we all have those choices, but we don’t sort of recognize we have those choices early on, especially in our careers.

**Craig:** We do not.

**Liz:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** I did not.

**Liz:** But I also think it’s how – what are you willing to give up? Like I think one of the things that I was really lucky about of The Post happening not when I was 22 years old is that I had a life. I was married. I knew what was important. I had really close friends, really close family who didn’t care really about – they were excited for me, but that didn’t change their perspective of me. Well, hopefully. I guess I’ll find out.

So I was like I’ll go work in a coffee shop. You know, I’ll go be a librarian. My priorities are not based really on the success of my career. They’re based on the happiness of the people in my life and that I hope my job helps that, doesn’t hinder it. And so I try and make choices that it’s like, you know, would I rather go work in a library in the Pacific Northwest than make this movie? Then maybe I shouldn’t make this movie.

**Craig:** Ooh, I don’t know if I should be applying that test because I think I might pick the library every time at this point.

**Liz:** Yeah.

**John:** But you don’t want to make fear-based choices about the things you’re doing. Like I better take this project or else I won’t get another project. So, I think as you get through your career you can recognize like am I making this choice to do this project because it is something that I actually want to do, or is it something I fear if I don’t do that there will be a consequence?

**Craig:** I mean, tell me I’m wrong, but I always felt like you were actually really good about that. That you weren’t somebody that made choices out of fear. Whereas I only made choices out of fear for so long.

**John:** Well, sometimes I wouldn’t make choices out of fear, but make choices out of envy. Like I knew somebody else was going to make that movie. I know that movie is going to get made. And I want to make that movie.

**Craig:** I’ll be walking by the theater going why did I not?

**John:** There was a major book series that I passed on just on concept and then it became like one of the biggest book series of all time.

**Liz:** 50 Shades of Grey?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** 50 Shades.

**John:** And it’s like, no, I wouldn’t want to do that.

**Craig:** I would love to see your 50 Shades by the way. Now I really want to see your 50 Shades of Grey. It would be amazing.

**John:** It was not 50 Shades of Grey.

**Craig:** That would be so great.

**John:** Liz, when do we get to see your movie?

**Liz:** All the Bright Places comes out on Netflix February 28th. I think there is a trailer dropping the first week of February, so you can actually watch a trailer that has–

**John:** That’s not fan-made but actually made by professionals.

**Liz:** Not fan made. A real trailer. And super excited. And then I guess you watch it forever because it’s on Netflix. So–

**Craig:** Forever.

**Liz:** Would love for people to watch it the opening weekend. Opening I guess is so–

**Craig:** Opening minute. Opening second.

**Liz:** Opening minute. Yeah. And also if you’re in LA I’m going to host a screening at the Alamo Draft House the Sunday after the release.

**John:** Oh great.

**Craig:** Love that. That’s great.

**John:** That will be nice. All right. Before we get into our How Would This Be a Movies, I wanted to take a look at an article by James Pogue in The Baffler which was called They Made a Movie Out of it, which is sort of the other side of this whole story. And so this article takes a look at how nonfiction journalism, especially long-form nonfiction journalism, has become such a pipeline for movies to get made. And that source of IP has become incredibly important. And Pogue really rails against it. And to kind of comedic effect also in a way. I found it kind of hilarious at a certain point.

But he talks about war time romance, unlikely savants, deranged detectives, gentlemen thieves, love-struck killers. Stories that tap into the thrill of being alive as being the mandate behind these companies that are sort of essentially packaging together, not literally packaging in the way that agencies do, but they are creating these stories with the intention that they will become movies down the road.

So, it was the first time I saw someone actually writing up about this phenomenon which I think we’ve all kind of seen. And it’s really there. So, Craig, what was your first take on this article?

**Craig:** I was very glad that he wrote it. I am currently subsumed by people who are like here’s a podcast, here’s a book, here’s an article about some horrible thing that happened, because obviously that’s what you do. And every single time I think to myself why would I need this? It’s facts. So, what I think is going on is that there is this world of producers, and I don’t mean to tar them with an evil brush. They’re doing their jobs. But what they’re doing is they’re trying to present to Hollywood ownership of something, an exclusivity. I got a book out of galleys that is about this event. Now I own the rights to it. And we can now make something of it and no one else can. And I’m just like, oh yes we can. Oh yes we can.

And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said, like my lawyer will call and will say, “OK, I got this submission. This producer has this thing.” And I’m like, OK, but what are they for? So they just planted a flag on a thing that is community property, like they went to a fire hydrant and said my fire hydrant. It’s not your fire hydrant.

And the worst part of this, and he really does such a good job of pointing this out, is that it’s distorting the way journalists do their work.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because they know how this works. They can see what sells. And the money they get from selling the rights is vastly more than the money they get to do their actual jobs, which is a shame.

**Liz:** Yeah. We should definitely pay journalists better.

**Craig:** Yes. So it’s distorting the way we are now receiving information. And that part is the scariest of them all. I always say like, hey, the reason you’re sending me – I never say this to them – but I’m like the reason you’re sending me this book that is a bunch of facts that nobody owns is because you saw a show I did and you think I will do good with this. But there was no producers with books and properties back then. You know, in fact we were in “competition” with a project that Scott Rudin had because he bought a book out of galleys. Which, by the way, was an excellent book. But that book came out when our show came out. So they’re waiting around for a book to be published. Do you know what I mean?

Anyway, so I thought this was a great article. And I would just say to people like to writers if you love some bit of history don’t be afraid to talk to those people, but you don’t get boxed out of anything just because somebody has the rights to nonfiction.

**John:** So let’s talk about the money for a second because what Pogue says is that a long-form piece in something like The New Yorker is about $9,000 is what a top tier writer could expect to make out of this. Versus like options could be $300,000. It could be more than that. And so they’re definitely looking at a paycheck. And so even while on a screenwriter level, like a top tier screenwriter, that’s not a ton of money, for a journalist that is a ton of money.

Mark Harris had a tweet this last week where he was saying, “I talked to a writer today who told me her goal is to establish a Twitter persona—“

**Liz:** Oh right. I saw this.

**John:** “—that she can leverage into a deal for a book of identity-driven essays that she can sell as a streaming series that she will consult on and kick off her TV creator-producer career.” And so it is that sense of like if I’m going to be a journalist I have to be thinking about what stories I’m going to tell that can actually carry on to the next thing. And that’s not what journalism was supposed to be about.

**Liz:** Well, it’s also complicated because we’re living in a world of IP. We live in this world where everything has to be based on IP. Everything. You can’t, you know, do this – I mean, genuinely one of the reasons everybody freaked out about Knives Out, I mean, I think it’s a really great movie, but it’s also because it was original. It felt different. It felt like there wasn’t some underlying anything for it.

And so I think it’s really hard as – by the way, any version of writers, journalists, screenwriters, anybody – is going into a study and selling something and just being like, no, I made it up. Or, no, it’s about this time in history. And by the way it’s real. And I don’t need to back it up with a novel or a book or a nonfiction book. So I think that’s really hard.

Whereas when you say like here’s the book that this is based on everybody’s eyes sort of light up and they’re more excited. And they see the Time cover.

**Craig:** They shouldn’t be.

**Liz:** By the way, there is a tie-in book cover for All the Bright Places that has just been released for the fifth anniversary of the book.

**Craig:** But that’s fiction. Like I get that. But for nonfiction, everybody is just staring at this book, thinking that the book is going to get them through. It’s not. Especially if it’s nonfiction.

**Liz:** Well, by the way, The Post.

**John:** I was going to say The Post is based on real stories but it’s not based on any specific book, correct?

**Liz:** No, it’s not. It was never based on one specific book.

**Craig:** There you go.

**Liz:** It’s based on about a dozen different people’s stories. And actively Katharine Graham never wanted her memoir optioned, which was one of the issues everybody felt of adapting it. But in reality you don’t need that specific book to write a story about her life.

**Craig:** You don’t need it. Right.

**Liz:** And in fact that book is – by the way, personal history. Everybody should read it. But it’s specific to her perspective. And it’s her story.

**Craig:** That’s the other problem with this is that when you get these books you’re getting a point of view that you’re now locked into. If I had to pick one book about Chernobyl that show would not be what the show is because everybody has their focus. In fact, that’s how they end up selling the book. There is no event. Pick anything in – let’s just pick something. Vietnam War. There’s been 4,000 books about the Vietnam War. If you’re going to sell one now that somebody is going to option it has to be from a point of view that no one is like – this is a Vietnam War from the view of Viet Cong. He’s 16 years old. And he’s got to get from here to here. It’s his real story.

I get books like this now all the time. And I’m like that’s great. But, again, I’m only writing about that? That’s what I’m doing? Really?

**Liz:** Well, I mean, I think this is also 1917 which was a movie that I frankly was like dreading watching because I was like it’s another war movie.

**John:** And it was very specific.

**Liz:** I’ve seen this before. But, then I sat down and within five minutes I was like, oh, this is completely different because this is so specific. And it’s so personal.

**Craig:** It’s personal. It’s not a book.

**Liz:** First of all, I think it’s genius. But it’s so personal. And so that – I think there’s this dread of watching historical movies because you’re like it’s just going to be the same thing, or I’ve done all these, blah-blah-blah. If you’re encompassing one big story, you kind of have to do it either way. You’re either encompassing a huge story from multiple perspectives, or you’re doing the one. And I think that’s how you can do it now.

**Craig:** And you get to choose.

**Liz:** And you get to choose.

**Craig:** Whereas the book is choosing for you. And then when you show up as a writer, this is the other problem with these books, and these articles, and these podcasts, which I hate, is that you show up as a writer as an employee from the jump. Right? If you go and you say I have an idea, I want to write a history of the Washington Post and Katharine Graham and Ben Bradley and all these things that happened.

**John:** Or if you just go and do it yourself as a spec.

**Craig:** Or you do it yourself, exactly. I am the property. The writer is the thing that matters. As opposed to would you like to rent a room in my book house for a while, employee? And I just think we lose power from the jump with this stuff.

**Liz:** It’s interesting. Because I just adapted a podcast as a limited and I had never done that before. It’s a true story. And what I found interesting was actually–

**John:** It wasn’t Scriptnotes, was it?

**Liz:** It…

**John:** Oh yeah. Who is playing me is what I want to know.

**Craig:** I am.

**Liz:** Yeah, sorry.

**Craig:** It’s the weirdest thing.

**John:** That’s such a bold choice.

**Craig:** It’s so weird. Well she said that I knew you well enough and that I could do it.

**Liz:** I wrote him a cover letter and I was describing his character. And that’s how he agreed to do it.

But so I adapted this podcast and it was really interesting because it was kind of the best version of what we’re talking about because it actually was multitudes of perspectives. It was a podcast that was done by journalists and so there were dozens of people that they interviewed. And so what it was, they had done all the research for me.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Liz:** And so it was in one way for me the most freeing way to do that because I had all these different perspectives. Not just me, obviously. The team that I was working with. And that I think is really freeing. If that had been one person and that had been one person’s perspective on this story I don’t think there was any way to do it. And that’s very limiting. But because it’s IP everybody is really excited.

**Craig:** I’m with you on that. There was a podcast that I was considering adapting and it was very much like the one you’re saying. It was very broad in its scope and it was so brilliantly researched and done. And so I felt like, OK, this is the most amazing research partner of a general world of stuff. But these things where they’ll come to you, “We have a podcast about one family and their war against another family in this little town. And it’s crazy the things that happen.” I’m like, great, but that’s like, ugh. So it’s all real and it’s very narrow. And can I just listen to the podcast and then do my version?

Why do I actually need? You know? Anyway.

**Liz:** Why does every episode have to follow the episode of that? Yeah.

**John:** So Pogue’s article I think very smartly points to Argo as being really a key point in the progression of this. Because Argo is based on this Wire piece by the guy who founded this journalism company, Joshuah Bearman. And that became sort of the platonic ideal of sort of like what the true life story turned into good Hollywood entertainment. It had all of the pieces and beats that you sort of want to see. And I think we’ve referenced Argo a lot as we’ve done these How Would This Be a Movie segments. It’s like you’re taking a real life story and how you’re transforming it. But I really wasn’t thinking about the underlying piece of IP. I was just thinking about the actual events and assuming that a great script was written because it was a great script.

**Craig:** Well we will watch these things and appreciate them when they’re done really, really well. But the business layer in our industry looks at process. And they’re trying to duplicate a process. So a writer sent me an email this morning and he said, “I want you to know that I was meeting at a place,” he wouldn’t tell me where, “and they have asked their executives to just start compiling lists of industrial disasters.”

**John:** That’s amazing.

**Craig:** And I just was like you dumb–

**John:** Taking the wrong lesson.

**Craig:** Dumb, dumb dodos. Like you dopes. But this is what they do. So Argo is a remarkable story that, you know, as we do ours and we’ll do some today, some of these resist and some of these as you know just blossom in front of you. Argo is one that just like any one of us I think could have looked at that and said we know what to do. It was one of those. And not to take anything away from the brilliance of what they did do, but you could see how it could be something. And they don’t understand that.

They just see a process. Buy article. Sell article. Make money. Because so many of them make money from just things being made. Not from them being made correctly or interestingly or, yeah.

**Liz:** Well, I think it’s also what you’re talking about is the specificity of a writer’s voice, too. Because I think there’s also the version where the three of us see all of the events of what takes place in Argo and there are three different movies and none of them are actually Argo that Chris Terrio wrote.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**Liz:** And so I think that, you know, The Post was a movie that wasn’t a remarkable and a unique idea to be like I want to make a movie about the Pentagon Papers and Katharine Graham. People have been sort of talking about it. When I was writing it I heard there were two other scripts going on at the same time that were, by the way, very different, that were much more focused on – I haven’t obviously read any of them but I was told much more focused on the Pentagon Papers.

So my unique vision on what to do was to follow Kay. And so that’s really specific. A dozen other movies could have been made about Ben Bradley. About The New York Times. About any other version of those stories, of those events. So I think like to people listening who are wondering like well I want to make a movie about the Vietnam War. I want to make a movie about this, but like every movie has been made about this, everything has ever been said. Well what are you saying that’s different? What are you bringing to it that’s going to be unique?

**John:** Yep. So, I asked on Twitter saying what stories should we talk about for a How Would This Be a Movie. And so here’s what I did not pick, but I want to single them out because they were some really, really great stories that I didn’t pick for this one. People asked like, oh, an adaptation of the book She Said, the Harvey Weinstein story. Sure. Great.

The History of the Vibrator. The Secret History of the Vibrator. It’s different than you expect. It was not actually done by a medical professionals for hysterical women. It was actually a very different origin.

A stripper named [Tanka Ray] who had a great backstory.

**Craig:** [Tanka Ray].

**Liz:** Love it.

**John:** What actually is happening in the Chevy/JD Power commercials, the ones where they keep revealing all these real life people.

**Craig:** Oh yes.

**John:** And JD Power. Like what the hell is JD Power?

**Craig:** And Associates.

**John:** The demon ZoZo who often shows up with Ouija Boards.

**Craig:** Oh, OK.

**Liz:** Wow, that was not a twist I saw coming.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** ZoZo.

**John:** Outsourcing of hitmen, so hitmen who keep hiring a subcontractor and a subcontractor.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**Liz:** Is that like Barry season four?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** It will be.

**John:** It is. This woman who falls in love thanks to being catfished. She actually falls in love with the guy whose photos were being used by the cat-fisher. And they actually–

**Liz:** That’s awesome.

**Craig:** She fell in love with the stock photo guy.

**John:** Yeah. Stock photo.

**Craig:** I love that. That’s amazing.

**Liz:** That’s great.

**John:** Ronald Reagan’s October surprise. Bic vs. Gillette. Could be the new Ford vs. Ferrari.

**Liz:** That’s the one we’ve been waiting for.

**John:** Yes. Firefighters who are saving the dinosaur trees of Australia. Tuna price-fixing. Ships frozen in ice at the North Pole. Soldiers battling wolves in WWI.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** There’s some good stuff here. But for today I picked political stories. Things that have a good political angle because I feel like we’re in a political moment. Liz, you’re a person who writes movies with politics involved.

**Liz:** Unfortunately. Sorry everybody.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The first one I want to talk about is Jeff Bezos and his phone getting hacked. Because this was a really complicated saga also with some iconic characters. It’s still kind of happening in real-time in front of us. Very short version of this. Everyone knows Jeff Bezos. This is a summary that John Gruber did. And so John Gruber has a site called Daring Fireball. And I really liked his pitch for what this saga was. I’m going to summarize it a bit here.

The richest man in the world, a billionaire a hundred times over, meets and exchanges phone numbers with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, the most powerful dictator in the Middle East. The richest man in the world happens to own as a mere side business The Washington Post, a newspaper whose news coverage and opinion columns have been highly critical of the Saudi Arabian royal family’s brutal and aggressive regime. The crown prince uses this superficial personal relationship with the richest man in the world to hack his phone by an infected attachment sent by WhatsApp using military grade technology seemingly crafted by a secretive firm from Israel that supposedly only offers its services to trusted governments.

With the information they extract they end up revealing an affair that he’s been having. His marriage falls apart. He brings in Gavin de Becker, a world-famous sort of researcher and protector to figure out what’s happening. The president of the United States is involved in the saga. The president’s son-in-law is involved in the saga. A team of Saudi agents brutally murder and dismember Jamal Khashoggi, who was a reporter for The Washington Post.

There’s just a lot of pieces here. So, the Jeff Bezos MBS saga, how do we start this movie?

**Liz:** Well, if it’s Craig there is a natural disaster or a manmade disaster probably.

**John:** Well let’s take a look at this on—

**Liz:** This is the article. This is the one you’ve been looking for.

**Craig:** This is it.

**John:** Let’s take a look at this on two fronts. First off, the actual story. And then I think we should also talk realistically about how challenging it will be to make this movie given the people involved.

**Craig:** Well, so weirdly I don’t think it would be hugely challenging depending on the company. There are some companies that are tied up with money from the Middle East, but generally not from Saudi Arabia. Look, I think one of the competitors to Amazon, whether it be Netflix or Hulu would be thrilled to maybe poke Bezos. It’s not like he’s going to kick their stuff off of Amazon here and there. But when I read through this story the challenge I see it as is that other than the Khashoggi story which was just terrible and shocking, I’m not sure I care that much.

In other words, it’s a billionaire who is getting poked back by another billionaire and his marriage falls apart. But he’s OK. And he continues to own that business and The Washington Post. It is concerning that Saudi Arabia is in possession of technology that can do this. But that’s it. It’s sort of like so it happens and then it’s like and how what. And did it change the world? Did it crack the earth open in any significant way? I don’t really think so.

So, weirdly my problem with dramatizing this is I’m not sure that it’s dramatic in any significant way. That’s kind of – yeah.

**John:** All right. Liz, you made another movie about The Washington Post.

**Liz:** I did do that.

**Craig:** Which was dramatic.

**John:** So I’m wondering where do you see – what characters would you focus on if you were doing this movie?

**Liz:** That I think was my initial reaction reading it was like who is the POV character in this? Because I agree. I didn’t have, again, I think aside from Khashoggi which that I think in this story and the way this article is laid out is almost an afterthought to what happened. And that for me is the emotional crux and the tragedy of this whole story. And so I wonder if there’s something there of that you’re telling the story when billionaires fight there are consequences. And it’s not just done over text message. There are actual legitimate fatal consequences to this power play and to whomever is in the White House currently.

And I think – so that for me was like I don’t know that this article is the story, but if this is the backdrop there’s probably a deeper emotional conversation to be had about the side effects of billionaires trying to play each other.

**John:** Yeah. So we’ll link to a couple different articles. And this to me of all – we were talking about sort of like whether things need to be based on IP or based on articles – I don’t think there has to be anything based on an article here at all.

**Craig:** No way. Yeah.

**John:** That question of POV, I would have generally said like I don’t care about rich people’s problems, and then I watched Succession. And I guess it turns out I really do care about rich people’s problems.

**Liz:** I love rich people’s problems on Succession.

**Craig:** Although, are they rich people’s problems? Because my obsession with Succession is that the richness exacerbates family problems. And that they’re everyone’s family problems.

**Liz:** Well it’s basically King Lear.

**Craig:** Yes. It’s King Lear.

**John:** But the degree to which Jeff Bezos and his wife MacKenzie Bezos and Lauren Sanchez, that it is a classic affair but taken to such a weirdly Titanic level. And so I think what might be possibly interesting about doing this story is that you have these characters who are almost like Olympian gods at this sort of Titanic level up here. And then you have the contrast of that with sort of ordinary people. And so I don’t know there’s ways you get down to the Amazon fulfillment worker and the researcher, or the hacker who is doing this one little bit of code, but there may be some way of just looking at how disparate these people’s lives are. The scale at which they’re playing. Because it’s true that also I think national/international policies is happening partly because of this affair. And this weird text message being sent back and forth has triggered something huge in the world over what should be something kind of inconsequential. I think that might be the way you get over the scale problem.

**Liz:** Yeah. It’s also a little bit like The Laundromat. It’s kind of the story of the little guys that are affected. You know, it’s the people who are not involved in the power plays and not involved in those conversations and not involved in the affair and they’re getting totally screwed.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s talk about some of the dangers about trying to tackle this story at all. Because you said that you felt like a Netflix or an HBO might be willing to some of this. I come back to thinking of Sony and North Korea. And I do wonder if you’re the company that’s trying to this thing you may be looking at not just legal challenges from Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, but also a government who is trying to destroy things.

**Craig:** Yeah. And they’ve proven that they have some technologies there. So, that is an issue. And it’s going to become more of an issue because we know for instance that it’s not possible to tell certain stories about China. This has been coming up a lot because I’ve been getting a lot of tweets and things about Wuhan and coronavirus and what the Chinese government is doing, which sounds very, very familiar to anybody that’s looked at the way other certain communist governments have handled these kinds of things. And the fact remains that I just don’t see how you could make a movie that is critical of the Chinese government in Hollywood today because of the intertwining of finances. It’s just not possible. I just don’t think it’s possible.

And that’s obviously of great concern. It’s going to become of more concern. This is not the first time Hollywood has had this problem. Curiously they did in the 30s. The Nazi government started basically pressuring Hollywood to not make certain kinds of things or they wouldn’t show the movies in Germany. And Hollywood in its typical way said, “OK.” Because Hollywood is cowardly and loves money.

So, despite all of the wonderful speeches that people in Hollywood seem to make about progress and freedom and liberty and so forth, it’s going to become harder and harder to do this because of globalization and the globalization of the marketplace. And more importantly the globalization of financing turns everything into a tricky mess. And sooner or later you just end up with whatever the safest villain is when we start making these movies.

So, famously the Red Dawn remake, right? It’s like, yeah, North Korea, what are they going to do, right? So I think in 20 years the only villains that we’ll have in movies will be the North Koreans. We’re telling some story about what happened when the United States invaded Grenada, it will still be North Korea. We’ll just change it to North Korea.

**John:** We’ll just have to invent some random country. Some island nation.

**Liz:** Yeah. I mean, I think it’s interesting talking about globalization and things like that because look at what happened with the NBA when Daryl Morey tweeted about Hong Kong.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. And the cowardliness was just kneejerk, right?

**Liz:** And I think there’s also the problem of people being undereducated to actually the things that are happening. I think people will just say kind of a blanket statement of like, oh, well this is what’s happening. But not knowing and not understanding. Frankly, I think the fact that the Houston Rockets didn’t fire Daryl Morey is a big statement and I think is good that they did not take it to that level and they didn’t fine him and things like that.

**Craig:** Right.

**Liz:** But it is really this conversation of fear and it is a conversation of, you know, look, I’ve not done a project because I was genuinely afraid that the people that I was writing about would take over my car and make me crash into the side of the building. There are those things.

**Craig:** Those thoughts have crossed my mind as well.

**Liz:** Yeah. There are those stories that there is a legitimate fear. And do I really want to write that one or am I OK just turning my car on and leaving that one on the side? So, Saudi Arabia is a little scary. That’s a little, you know.

**Craig:** It is.

**Liz:** I would prefer not to have them hack my phone.

**John:** All right. Also looking at globalization and probably the single person who most embodies globalization at this moment would be Carlos Ghosn. So this all happened while I was in Japan. I was there for the holidays. And so I was there as all this stuff happened. So, if you don’t know who Carlos Ghosn is he was born in Brazil to Lebanese parents, raised in Lebanon. He attended some of France’s best schools. He was working for the tire-maker Michelin. He worked on his English and became head of the North American company, for Nissan, Renault, Mitsubishi, that alliance.

He was arrested in Tokyo for basically hiding money, not declaring money that he’d gotten in. On December 29th he escaped and made his way all the way back to Lebanon, which should have been impossible, and he somehow did it. So, this feels like – what I love about this story is I can completely imagine a version of this where he is the hero and this remarkable, daring escape he’s made, or that he is a great villain who has fled from Japan.

**Craig:** Or a MacGuffin.

**Liz:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Like he’s like the light in the briefcase. First of all, Carlos Ghosn’s last name for a word puzzle nerd is such a gift.

**Liz:** Phenomenal. It’s great.

**Craig:** Like I’m looking at Carlos Ghosn. I’m like, OK, is there a puzzle where other names I can just remove. I can change one letter in the first name and one letter in the last name, both to T, and make a phrase like car lot ghost. So now I have a whole Carlos Ghosn puzzle I’m going to try and work on.

But, my take on this would be like you get hired by a company that’s like here’s the deal, we got to figure out how to get this dude out of this country over there.

**John:** Logistics.

**Liz:** 100%.

**Craig:** It’s logistics. And it’s a comedy.

**John:** A heist in a way.

**Craig:** It’s a heist where you’re moving a human through. And it’s really hard. And you have to make money. And maybe you kind of get to know him while he’s talking through the box or whatever. But I love the idea of kind of a logistics-based black comedy.

**Liz:** I think we should get the Ocean’s crew back for this one.

**John:** Totally. So, at one point in order to get into a plane he’s basically smuggled inside a box, because it was just too big to go through the normal scanner. So they don’t detect that a human being is inside that.

**Craig:** I don’t know. When you read it, because the thing is when you look at him it’s just kind of funny. Like I’m not scared of this guy.

**John:** No.

**Liz:** No.

**Craig:** He seems kind of like a goof.

**Liz:** He threw a Marie Antoinette-themed birthday party for his wife.

**Craig:** He’s a goof, right?

**Liz:** Like it sounds amazing.

**Craig:** Yeah. So it smells like a comedy to me also because his crime is financial. And while we know that financial crimes have impacts on real people, he’s not a murderer. He wasn’t like polluting the air with some evil chemical. He just, you know. And, look, he also kind of has a point. I mean, his point was I got arrested in Japan for this crime and their conviction rate is 99%. That’s a huge problem. Like that is legitimately a problem.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** It doesn’t appear that there’s such a thing as a fair trial in Japan if everyone is guilty. So I kind of got like a little bit of sympathy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know? Look, he’s probably a total criminal. But, I don’t know, I just thought it was fun.

**Liz:** Do you think the Japanese government was like, “We got to lose that one case so it’s not 100%.” Do you think they have that conversation?

**John:** A ringer.

**Liz:** We’ve got to keep it just at 99% guys. Because otherwise we’ve got issues.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think they need to adjust that number. I’ve got to be honest with you. 99 is not–

**Liz:** I have questions.

**Craig:** Like I think the federal government has like a 90% conviction rate here in the US.

**John:** Which you could argue like–

**Craig:** They pick the winners.

**John:** They only try the cases that they know they can win.

**Craig:** But even there like, you know, like one out of ten. That feels like we’re normal. If you win every game as a pitcher you’re probably juicing, you know? So lose one.

**John:** I will put a link in the show notes to an article that talks about the Hollywood connection behind all this because – actually both of these stories have Hollywood connections.

**Craig:** That was the craziest.

**John:** Yeah. So Ghosn was talking with a producer about sort of like that his life felt like a movie in this way. And so this was before he had actually done this great escape. So I think that’s funny.

Going back to the previous story, there’s a Hollywood connection there, too, because the way the party at which Jeff Bezos and MBS met was here in Hollywood. Brian Grazer was throwing this party and Iger was there and other folks were there. So it’s so–

**Craig:** Never go to a Brian Grazer party. Never go.

**John:** That’s what tends to happen.

**Craig:** I mean, I’ve never been invited.

**John:** Nope.

**Liz:** Yeah, I was like how many of those invitations have you shot down, Craig?

**Craig:** Zero.

**Liz:** There you go.

**Craig:** Zero. But I’m just saying prospectively I’m not doing it.

**Liz:** You have a 99% of not going to a Brian Grazer party.

**Craig:** Of not going to a Brian Grazer party.

**John:** All right. Our third and final story is also political. This is about Holly Cairns—

**Liz:** Love this one.

**John:** Standing against partner Christopher O’Sullivan. This is in rural Cork. She is a candidate for the Social Democrats. He is a candidate for some other political party whose name I can’t pronounce.

**Craig:** But they’re like a moderate, moderate-left versus left-left.

**John:** Yes. But they’re both running for the same spot. It feels like a classic setup, but I was trying to remember what other movies had the male and female—

**Liz:** Competing.

**John:** Competing.

**Craig:** The Competition.

**John:** What other rom-com has the couple against each other?

**Craig:** The Competition is a great movie, Richard Dreyfuss and Amy Irving are both competitive pianists. And they’re falling in love while they’re at a competition. They’re not like already together. That’s a new one. Hmm?

**Liz:** I can’t pull any.

**Craig:** Yeah, I don’t think so.

**Liz:** I mean, I really – reading this I was like – can we just do the sequel to Long Shot with this? Because it’s such a great story. I also liked that there’s also three seats available. So the two of them could–

**Craig:** Which kind of takes away the—

**Liz:** Takes a little bit.

**John:** The stakes.

**Craig:** The reality has lowered the stakes.

**Liz:** And also the article left that to be like the last line of the article.

**Craig:** Which I was like oh you people.

**Liz:** Yeah. You just got me.

**Craig:** And also but like the danger is the article, or at least one of the articles starts off with, “It sounds like a bad romantic comedy.” And you’re like that’s the problem. It kind of sounds like a bad romantic comedy. So how do you make the good romantic comedy version out of it? Because the two of them seem actually lovely. And they’re married and they’re staying married, which means there’s actually not a ton of conflict there it seems.

**Liz:** No. And you can tell they’re not Americans because they’re so just casual and like, well, we agree about everything except politics. So it’s fine. And I was like I’ve never – I don’t understand that. That’s not a sentence that’s ever been said in the United States.

**Craig:** And also like they’re both super good-looking. It’s actually really annoying. I hate them.

**John:** All right. So let’s talk about the challenges. If you get hired to do this story what are the things you’re going to be looking for in order to create the conflict, the challenge that you need? And so we’ve had other writers come on talking about the romantic comedy engine. What are we looking for in a comedy and in here that’s going to make this possible so it doesn’t just stall out?

**Liz:** I mean, for me I think comedy is always best when it’s organic and relatable. Like I think when you – character flaws are inherently comedic. Particularly if you see a reflection of yourself in them. So, I think this feels like a relationship comedy to me. This feels like two people who like the only reason they’re not together is because they disagree about everything. You know, so, it feels a little like a comedy version of like War of the Roses. And you get two really dynamic people who – and passionate people.

My only thing is I don’t know if the conflict of the movie can be sustained about two people arguing about politics.

**Craig:** No.

**Liz:** That feels like a–

**Craig:** Death.

**John:** But here’s where I think the upcoming election gives you a real benefit in this story that you don’t normally get in a romantic comedy. It’s like there is a deadline. There is going to be a decision reached. And normally when a couple has conflict about when do we have kids, are we staying here or are we moving, there’s never a decision. And actually it can feel like the population is getting to vote on some of these things.

**Craig:** Right. My gut is that there’s no way to do this story if they’re happily married in the beginning.

**Liz:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** It’s not a good marriage. It’s falling apart. And the fact that one of them chooses to run against the other is the ultimate shot across the bow. And then what they find, and this is a very romantic comedy sort of way of looking at it, is as they compete with each other they just start getting hotter and hotter to each other.

**Liz:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Again.

**Liz:** It’s a little Mr. and Mrs. Smith meets like The American President.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yes. There you go.

**Craig:** Exactly. And so what happens is they are back together again and then one of them discovers that the other one has kind of screwed them over campaign wise. It’s that phrase all’s fair in love and war. No. There is an interesting movie where you say that’s nonsense. All is not fair in love at the very least. Right? And so it was like it started bad, it got good, it went terrible, and then there’s the election and obviously something good happens at the end you would hope.

The problem with these movies, and when I say these movies – movies where the climax is leading up to a competition. Sports movies have this all the time. Election movies have this. Someone has to win and someone has to lose. And there’s only so many permutations. The least interesting one is like the person that we thought would win would win. So you see in like, sports movies got smart. They used to be like “we win” and then they were like “we win the semi-final, who knows what will happen next.”

**Liz:** We got the emotional win. We got the character win.

**Craig:** And then they were like “we lose but we lose with honor.” So they’ve done so many permutations. And when you’re dealing with a man and a woman it’s like, well, if the man wins it just feels like, ugh, men win, cliché. But if the woman wins it also feels quite like, ugh, they had to let the woman win. You know?

All the nonsense gears-turning of people misinterpreting. So then what do you do at the end? Do they both lose? But then you feel like, ugh, they both lost. Screw this movie. What do you do?

**Liz:** Or do you do the version – and this is not the romantic comedy version – but this is like the romantic drama version where somebody wins and they breakup.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s so sad.

**Liz:** I know. Sorry guys. I brought you down.

**Craig:** Oh, and then there’s also the whole like Gift of the Magi version where it’s a tie and they each voted for each other. You know, like there could be something sweet. I’m such a sentimentalist.

**Liz:** Yeah, that doesn’t happen.

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

**Liz:** That’s not happening. That’s not a thing that happens. Sorry. I think them breaking up actually is probably like the more interesting version if you’re going to do this. You basically do kind of like a high concept updated War of the Roses. And that like maybe the fighting has like pushed one of them to realize something they didn’t, but also realize we’re not supposed to be together.

**Craig:** I’m so old-fashioned. I want them to be together.

**Liz:** But maybe one of them is like, “I’m president, you’re vice-president, but we’re not going to be together. We’re the best functional as partners, but not romantically.” I don’t know.

**Craig:** Maybe there’s a way that they have to like – you know, like sometimes you can run for an office while you have an office. So let’s say she’s running for this office and he already has an office that he can keep. She wins. But she has to now work with him like as a coalition thing? Like I want them to be in love at the end.

**John:** Yeah. I do, too. A coalition government. That’s what we want.

**Craig:** Yeah. The Coalition is a good title, by the way.

**John:** Every relationship is a coalition government.

**Liz:** It’s true.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Liz:** That is accurate.

**John:** Every marriage is a coalition government.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Yes, I’ve been in the minority coalition my entire marriage.

**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is Trick Mirror. It’s a book by Jia Tolentino. The subtitle is Reflections on Self-Delusion. I thought it was great. Megana, our producer, had recommended it. And I read the first essay, The I in Internet, and thought it was so good I just reread the whole essay again. It was terrific.

She talks about growing up in a Houston megachurch. The sororities of UVA. The Peace Corps. Being on an early reality television show. She’s just a really good writer. You know there’s some writers who you’re like I’ll read whatever essay you write. I don’t care what it’s about. I’ll read that essay. And it was just great. So Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino.

**Craig:** Awesome. What about you, Liz?

**Liz:** Me? I’m going to do a health thing, which is really—

**Craig:** Ooh, health.

**Liz:** I know. So I’ve spent the last eight months in a room, which basically means I’ve stopped taking care of myself. And a friend of mine recently was like you need to drink more water because it’s going to make you healthier.

**Craig:** Oh, the water people.

**Liz:** I know, those water people.

**John:** They come. They come at you.

**Liz:** But she upped the stakes for it. Superior electrolytes. They are electrolytes you put into your water. It changed my life, genuinely.

**Craig:** Salt. So she sold you salt.

**Liz:** She sold me watermelon flavored salt.

**Craig:** OK. [laughs]

**Liz:** But here’s the thing. Genuinely I’ve been, again, this goes back to what we sort of always talk about which is taking care of yourself, and none of us do that. And particularly writers. It’s just so much easier not to. To stay sitting rather than get up. It’s a lot nice than having to walk around or exercise. But I’ve decided that I’m supposed to take care of myself now. And so superior electrolytes. They’re fantastic. I’ve actually genuinely in the ten days of doing it I found out I feel better when I’m hydrated.

**Craig:** Hydration is important.

**John:** That I totally believe.

**Craig:** Yeah, it turns out we do actually need – we are mostly water and we need the thing that we are.

**Liz:** Well, and if you work out you end up sweating, which is also horrible because that’s another reason we don’t work out.

**Craig:** It’s gross.

**Liz:** Yeah, it’s gross.

**Craig:** You’re peeing out of your skin. It’s disgusting.

**Liz:** It’s just a horrible thing.

**Craig:** It’s terrible.

**Liz:** But I highly recommend. This is a broader spectrum of things to say which is like take care of yourself. It is an important thing to do.

**Craig:** Always. Always, always, always. We’re big fans of that.

My One Cool Thing is a kind of a puzzle that I knew about for a couple of years because I’m a puzzle dork. I learned these little niche puzzles. Usually because I’ll get a puzzle and I’ll look at it and I’ll go what the hell is this. And then Dave Shukan who is my puzzle mentor will go, “Oh, that’s a this kind of puzzle.” I didn’t hear – what’s a that kind of puzzle?

So, a couple of years ago I was doing this puzzle and I’m like I don’t understand what I’m even looking at. And he goes, “Oh, oh, oh. Yeah. That’s called a star battle. It’s a certain kind of puzzle.” In the New York Times they do these big puzzle inserts at the end of the year and they included star battles. And they explained what they are. And people are very, very excited.

It’s such a fun puzzle to do. Very simple. It’s basically a grid. It’s like 10×10. And your job is to put two stars in every row and every column. But there can only be two stars in every row and every column. To make things a little trickier, but also a little easier, they also have these squiggly lines inside of the grid that are regions. In every region there must be exactly two stars.

So it’s this very elegant, very simple logic puzzle. And you’re like, OK, well I guess that shouldn’t be, and then it just absolutely possesses your mind. You can play them on the Internet for free if you just Google star battle puzzle. Like the very first hit should be one of those little online. And you can generate different sized grids and amounts of stars.

**John:** I love it.

**Craig:** Puzzles.

**Liz:** Have you ever played Wit’s End?

**John:** I have played Wit’s End.

**Craig:** What’s Wit’s End?

**John:** That’s the one where you have the little wooden walls that you put up?

**Liz:** No, no, no.

**John:** A different one. Tell us.

**Liz:** OK. So I’ll do one more quick thing. I’m a huge Trivial Pursuit nerd. We play Trivial Pursuit a lot in my house. The problem is we’ve run out of questions.

**John:** Oh! We call Wit’s End “smart people game.”

**Liz:** Well, Wit’s End is like an updated version of Trivial Pursuit. You can play with two more people. But the questions are very different. They’re not just trivia questions. There’s like word puzzle questions.

**Craig:** Oh I love this.

**Liz:** And there’s like ranking things. So you have to rank like the five countries that start with L from largest to smallest. And so—

**Craig:** I’m buying this thing right now.

**Liz:** It’s excellent. You can buy it on Amazon. It’s called Wit’s, like I’m witty, although I’m not, Wit’s End. Highly recommend. Really fun. Also goes very fast. Like we played two rounds in an hour. It’s great.

**John:** Great. Very nice. That is our show for this week. A reminder for our Premium members that we are going to do a bonus segment about books. If you are not a Premium member you can sign up at Scriptnotes.net. You can also give a gift membership if you want to give a gift membership to somebody. There’s a little button that says “send a gift.” So you can do that.

Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. With production assistance this week by Stuart Friedel and Dustin Vox.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Lachlan Marks. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust.

Liz, you are?

**Liz:** @itslizhannah.

**John:** Excellent. You can find show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. And reminder, Scriptnotes.net is where you sign up to get the Premium goodness. Liz Hannah, thank you so much for joining us here.

**Liz:** Thanks guys.

**Craig:** Thank you, Liz.

**Liz:** I want the jacket next time.

**Craig:** Done.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right. It’s time for our bonus segment. I want to talk about books and specifically what you’re allowed to do to a physical printed book.

**Craig:** Burn them!

**Liz:** I was going to say there’s one thing you’re really not allowed to do.

**John:** On Twitter this past someone showed a picture of like I find a way to make Ulysses more portable, basically they ripped it down the spine so you just take half of it with you at any point.

**Craig:** But people lost their shit. I mean, they went bananas.

**Liz:** That’s a tough one.

**John:** That’s a tough one.

**Craig:** I think book people think books are alive. [laughs]

**John:** And I grew up, I remember watching—

**Liz:** They have feelings.

**John:** They have feelings. I don’t know if it was a film or probably a film strip with like a [doop] that advanced to the next thing, we were talking about like when you get a library book or a new book you have to open it carefully and bend all the pages and how you don’t mark anything in it. And I’ve increasingly just started just writing in books or dog-earing pages.

Craig and Liz, what do you think is OK to do with a printed book?

**Liz:** I think anything except burning it. I really feel like that’s the one that you don’t do. I mean, I adapt a lot of books, so even in my professional career I have to highlight things. And have to underline things and stuff like that. So, I don’t know how I would begin to do my job without being able to do that.

I don’t think I’ve ever used a bookmark in my entire life.

**Craig:** Same.

**Liz:** So dog ear. Or if like it’s a hardcover sometimes I’ll try and do like the book cover–

**John:** Oh, the jacket.

**Liz:** The jacket into the page. But that inevitably, then the book jacket is gone.

**Craig:** It falls out.

**Liz:** And so inevitably it doesn’t happen. So, yeah, I think there’s just like one really big thing you don’t do with books, and then everything else feels OK.

**Craig:** And there’s one really big thing you do do with them, which is read them. So as long as you’re reading them, read them the way you want to read them. That’s what they’re there for.

**John:** Here’s a question for you. If I lend you a book, should I have any expectation that you’re going to give me the book back? That printed book?

**Craig:** Well, I mean, the word lend implies yes.

**Liz:** Yes. If I’m giving you a book then, no. But, what’s funny is I did recently give a friend of mine a book because I was like this book is great. And then he brought it back and I was like I really didn’t want it back. Like I don’t have enough space for this.

**John:** It’s not a boomerang.

**Craig:** Did you use the word gift?

**Liz:** No, this was yours. I gave it to you.

**Craig:** I’m giving you this book.

**Liz:** Yes. This is for you.

**Craig:** If someone says lend I immediately feel guilty and I’m in a panic and I want to send it back.

**Liz:** I also take care of it. I don’t mark it. I would say that’s something you don’t do. When somebody lends you a book do not highlight it. Do not dog ear it. That kind of stuff.

**Craig:** Well at that point what I usually say is because of the way I sometimes physically handle my books I’ll just buy it. Or, you know, get the e-book version which then I can do whatever I want.

**Liz:** Right. Who is reading Ulysses and needs to carry – we live with e-books and iPads in our world. By the way, you don’t have to tear anything off. And it’s lighter.

**Craig:** By the way, you don’t have to buy Ulysses. Isn’t it in public domain anyway?

**Liz:** I’m sure. I’m confused.

**John:** I’m confused, too. Well, I will say let’s talk about e-books versus printed books. Because like a previous recommendation was Chuck Wendig’s Wanderers, which is an 800-page book. And so I bought the book at Chevaliers where they’re doing the Arlo Finch book reading. Everyone should come to that. And you should go and support local bookstores and buy physical books, which is fantastic. So I bought this book at Chevaliers and I was like, oh my god, this book is so big and so heavy. It’s like uncomfortable to read. It’s just too big of a book. So I also bought the Kindle version. So, Chuck Wendig got paid twice.

**Liz:** There you go.

**John:** Which is good. But it was much easier to read that book. And Jia Tolentino’s book I just recommended, I did read the e-book version, although I had the printed version here at the office.

**Liz:** I do that a lot. I do the double purchase a lot.

**Craig:** I’ll do the double purchase.

**Liz:** Because I love having – I am a tactile person, so like actual reading of a book I enjoy. And like, you know, I keep a book in my bag whenever I’m traveling around waiting for meetings and stuff like that. You just have kind of a book.

But, you know, if I’m going on vacation I bring my iPad.

**Craig:** Totally.

**John:** I hate reading off the iPad. You’ll read a book on the iPad?

**Craig:** I do. But you read better from a book I think.

**Liz:** Yes, I do, too.

**Craig:** A proper book.

**John:** I read better from a Kindle.

**Liz:** I process it better.

**Craig:** I’ll get both versions for research purposes. Because you can search–

**Liz:** It’s so great.

**Craig:** Which is amazing, right? You can search, which is brilliant. And of course you can highlight if you wish, which is a little clunky, although the new pencil makes it a lot easier. But I still, a physical book I just find easier to deal with and easier – because that’s how I was raised. My daughter I don’t think ever reads a physical book unless it’s required for school or something. Everything is online. I mean, that’s how they’ve learned. It’s over, John.

**John:** It’s over.

**Craig:** It’s over. It’s over.

**Liz:** Well, we all knew that. Yeah, the only thing that I really actively read on my iPad are screenplays. Like I don’t read screenplays printed out anymore. I don’t do notes on printed out screenplays anymore. I do it on the iPad. And I just bought the big iPad.

**Craig:** Oh, the big-big.

**Liz:** The big-big one, which felt like an aggressive move until my husband was like, “No, it’s the size of a piece of paper.” And I was like, oh, well that changes everything.

**Craig:** Is that right?

**Liz:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh wow.

**Liz:** So one screenplay page is one–

**Craig:** That’s the one my daughter has. Oh, that’s actually kind of – is it heavy or?

**Liz:** Nope. It’s wonderful. Because you can do notes. And it’s not cramming them.

**John:** Is it the size of this one? Or is it bigger than this?

**Liz:** No, it’s bigger than that.

**Craig:** It’s the big-big.

**John:** Oh, I find that too big. But it works for you.

**Liz:** I thought it was going to be too big. And now I’m obsessed with it.

**Craig:** This is the one I have. I have the one that you have which is the standard size.

**John:** Which works well. But Craig, you and I used to – we grew up in D&D with physical books. And you’ve really transitioned to e-books for that.

**Craig:** OK, so like D&D wise, just having gone through the – so I’ve switched over pretty recently to just using the source books, because you can search. But the new revelation was I just built this new character with their character builder. It’s spectacular. It’s so good. And the best part is you never want to print it out. You always want to have it on your iPad because now you tap on something and it tells you exactly what it is. Like you never have to wonder or flip through. It is freaking great.

Obviously hugely relevant to your life, Liz. Hugely relevant to your life.

**Liz:** I just fell asleep for a couple minutes. No. No.

**Craig:** Once again, the light went out in her eyes.

**Liz:** There is just a little clicking off. No, you know, I tried. I tried.

**Craig:** Listen, that’s all anyone could ever ask. You don’t have to like things. You know, sometimes – I know I’m supposed to like kale. Right? It’s bad.

**Liz:** I feel the same way about kale as you do. Or you feel the same way about kale as I do about D&D. How about that?

**Craig:** I hear you.

**Liz:** That sounds good.

**Craig:** I hear you.

**John:** Consensus.

**Craig:** Consensus.

Links:

* [Liz Hannah](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liz_Hannah) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/itslizhannah) and [IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2176283/), and Scriptnotes episodes [242](https://johnaugust.com/2019/austin-film-festival-2019) and [359](https://johnaugust.com/2018/where-movies-come-from)
* The [2020 WGA Award nominees and winners](https://awards.wga.org/awards/nominees-winners)
* [Arlo Finch in the Kingdom of Shadows](https://johnaugust.com/arlo-finch#kos-preorder) will be having a [Launch Event: February 9, 2pm at Chevalier’s on Larchmont](https://www.chevaliersbooks.com/john-august-020920)
* [Scriptnotes, Episode 434](https://johnaugust.com/2020/ambition-and-anxiety) in which we discuss Knives Out
* [MoviePass parent Helios and Matheson files for Chapter 7 and stock falls to zero](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/moviepass-parent-helios-and-matheson-files-for-chapter-7-and-stock-falls-to-zero-2020-01-29), on MarketWatch
* [All the Bright Places](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Bright_Places_(film)) comes to Netflix on February 28
* [They Made a Movie Out of It](https://thebaffler.com/salvos/they-made-a-movie-out-of-it-pogue) by James Pogue
* John Gruber on [the Jeff Bezos phone hack](https://daringfireball.net/2020/01/hacked_to_bits)
* The New York Times on [Carlos Ghosn’s escape](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/06/business/carlos-ghosn-escape.html) and [the Hollywood connection](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/02/business/carlos-ghosn-movie.html)
* [‘Like a bad romcom’: couple run against each other in Irish election](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/27/couple-run-against-each-other-in-irish-election-holly-cairns-cork) from The Guardian
* [Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07L2JGLZ9/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1&linkCode=sl1&tag=johnaugustcom-20&linkId=b6ea2f4ef065e37692c379f26e11577a&language=en_US) by Jia Tolentino
* [Superieur Electrolytes](https://superieurelectrolytes.com/)
* [Star Battle puzzles](https://www.wired.com/2010/12/dr-sudoku-prescribes-star-battle/)
* [Wit’s End](https://www.amazon.com/Game-Development-Group-11104-Board/dp/B00004W60G) on Amazon
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Lachlan Marks ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/436standard.mp3).