The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August. This is Episode 548 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, films may have returned to theaters, but many of them are still being made exclusively for streamers. We’ll talk about the pros and cons of going straight to streaming, with the writers of two upcoming films.
First off, we have the writing team of Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, whose credits include How I Met Your Mother, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Most Likely To Murder, Pretty Smart, and the upcoming Chip ’n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers, debuting later this month on Disney Plus. Dan and Doug, it’s a pleasure to have you on the show.
Doug Mand: Thank you.
Dan Gregor: Excited to be here. Thank you for having us in your upstairs backroom.
John: Which of you is Chip and which of you is Dale?
Dan: I guess I was accused of being Dale. We did early recordings for temp voice. I was Dale and Doug was-
Doug: Chip.
Dan: We got dropped very quickly.
Doug: Emotionally, because it is a movie about friendship and partnership.
Dan: Through long-term Hollywood careers.
John: The people actually playing your roles in the movie, they’re newcomers, right? They’re no one you’ve ever heard of.
Dan: Nobody you’ve ever heard of. The character inspired by me is played by a young upstart named Andy Samberg.
Doug: The character inspired by me is a little whippersnapper named John Mulaney, who we all have high hopes for, but you never know in this business.
John: Things could turn on a dime.
Doug: Oh my gosh. We’re pulling for him though.
John: We are so excited to welcome our very own Aline Brosh McKenna, who’s recording… You’re going to be in the editing room for your upcoming Netflix feature, but now I see a library behind you, so you’re back at home, correct, Aline?
Aline Brosh McKenna: Indeed. We turned in a cut yesterday. We’re getting towards the end.
John: This would be a cut of Your Place Or Mine, her feature for Netflix. We’re so excited to see it. Do we have a release date for your film yet?
Aline: We do not.
John: Soon. I want soon.
Aline: It’s up to the folks who decide those sorts of things.
John: On this podcast we’re going to be discussing movies made for streamers and the uncertainty of when do our movies come out. We’ll also talk in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members about getting work done when you have a newborn, because Doug and Dan, you both have really young kids. I want to talk to you about that and the strategies you’re employing for actually getting things done when you have a small, screaming infant in your house.
Doug: Work a lot less.
Dan: Whoop, sorry, Premium.
John: A very short segment. First, we have some follow-up. Megana, can you help us out with some follow-up from previous episodes?
Megana Rao: In Episode 545 we spoke with Elizabeth Meriwether and Liz Hannah about How Would This Be A Movie. One of our topics was MacKenzie Scott. We talked about what a limited series about MacKenzie Scott would be like. Teresa tweeted at us, saying, “FYI, there is a TV comedy inspired by MacKenzie Scott, sort of, coming out on Apple TV Plus. It’s a Matthew Hubbard, Alan Yang show, and it stars Maya Rudolph.”
John: The combination of these people, Aline and I know. Maya Rudolph is incredibly funny. This would be inspired by MacKenzie Scott, but not really… Doug, I see a puzzled look on your face.
Doug: That’s just my resting face, but yeah, go ahead.
John: MacKenzie Scott was Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife who’s now giving away all this money. I looked at the show description for this new show. “Rudolph will star as Molly, a woman whose seemingly perfect life is upended when her husband leaves her with nothing but $87 billion.”
Doug: That’s great. That’s a very funny line.
John: That’s a good premise. When people talk about how do you write a good log line, that’s it. That’s a [crosstalk 00:03:25].
Doug: That’s a great log line. That’s fantastic.
Dan: That sounds great.
John: Kudos to Matthew Hubbard and Alan Yang for a very funny log line. May the show live up to it.
Dan: I think it’s really smart. I was listening to that episode, and I also was like, don’t get caught up in all the nonsense of how they met and their relationship. I just want to see-
Doug: Get right to it.
Dan: What’s it like to be a regular lady with $87 billion?
Doug: I don’t need the first episode to be like, “We met and it was all so great and he was just a regular guy.” I don’t care.
Dan: It’s really a funny premise.
Doug: Go spend that money. Let’s get to Brewster’s millions.
John: We like it. Now, Megana, you and I had a Bonus Segment a couple weeks back talking about murder houses and murder house architecture. We got some follow-up from Penelope about this.
Megana: Penelope from Melbourne said, “I was listening to your segment on murder house architecture, and it made me think of Tom Anderson’s brilliant essay film, Los Angeles Plays Itself, released in 2003. He explores in detail why modernist architecture is so often used as the headquarters of villains in movies and TV. It’s such a great documentary, well worth a look if you haven’t seen it yet.”
John: We’ll look at the trailer. I’ll link to the trailer in the show notes. I really liked this. It did really strike to me, if you see a modernist house in a movie, it’s almost always the villain who lives there. Even Charlie’s Angels, the villain lives in the Chemosphere, the most haunted modernist house of all time. In this trailer, I was looking, even LA Confidential, which I think of as being such a period movie, it was a period movie in a modernist era, and the bad guys live there.
Dan: Did you see Westworld?
John: Oh yeah.
Dan: It’s the deep future, and they mostly take place in the Old West. Still, when they ever leave, the villains are still living in the exact same evil modernist houses.
John: Frank Lloyd Wright’s-
Doug: Exactly.
John: …[inaudible 00:05:09] house.
Dan: Exactly. It’s 2030000 and we can’t ever have our mean people live anywhere but Frank Lloyd Wright.
Doug: It was wild that when CAA moved, also they moved to what looks like a large spaceship that’s ready to be sent off into the atmosphere.
Dan: Into the core of the earth.
Doug: There is an evil feeling when you roll in there. I love the CAA. It was just so perfect, it felt villainous, just their new location.
John: Now, Aline, in your film, do you have your characters living in modernist architecture or more traditional? Your film is set in Los Angeles, correct?
Aline: It is set in New York and Los Angeles. We have a little spin on that trope, which is that the person who needs to explore emotional growth lives in a rather modern, arid environment. The person who also needs to experience emotional growth but is a little bit more female, for starters, lives in a more cluttered, craftsman-y, Echo Park, not modern home. I guess I’m using those tropes as well, in a different format.
John: We love it. Last bit of follow-up. We had something from Adam in Brighton, England. Megana, help us out.
Megana: Adam wrote in and said, “On your last episode, I think it was Liz Hannah who said that six-episode seasons struggle to make a profit. As someone who often feels that shows are stretched too thin, I’ve long wondered if the problem is driven by business needs. Do you have any insight that you could share?
John: I have no insight, but we have a lot of people who have made a lot of TV here. Dan, help us out. Talk to us about shorter seasons and the economics and why you don’t see really short seasons.
Dan: The thing that seems pretty clear is that it’s amortized costs. If you have to build a set, all of a sudden that set for a couple episodes is very expensive, but if you’re doing it for a bunch of episodes, it’s expensive. Same thing with basically all of your contracts. Doug had a show that was a 10-episode order. I’m sure you had a sense of what… What would happen if you pushed it more or less?
Doug: I listened to that episode as well. I was like, “Oh, that is interesting,” because I had not had the six-episode discussion. Once you’re up and running, it’s a lot less money to do it, especially a show like Pretty Smart, which was a multi-cam, so the set’s built and you have everything in place. That’s the most I know about it. I didn’t know about the model for six to eight episodes, six episodes being a cutoff. I did not know about that. Neither of us have ever pitched something that would be that long.
John: Aline, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend obviously was… You were 13 episodes and then even longer I think at some times. What was the decision process for like… Originally you were a Showtime show, and then you went to CBS. How did the number of episodes factor into the budget?
Aline: They told us how many episodes to make. It was not our choice. We made 2 18-episode seasons and 2 13-episode seasons. It was based on the network studio and their needs. We ended up making 62 episodes. That would’ve been maybe five, six episodes of streaming or cable. We just made them in the overlapping network system, where everything was happening at the same time. We weren’t able to separate out the phases of production. That made it especially taxing and complicated, but it also allowed us to compress a lot of stuff into a relatively short amount of time.
John: You were able to do 18 episodes of a season within just a course of a calendar year, which as opposed to some of these limited series streaming things, it’s dragged out over 2 years just to do 6 or 8 episodes which is allotted.
Aline: I Love Lucy did 50.
Dan: A season?
Aline: Something like that.
Dan: Oh my god. How I Met Your Mother was a 22, 24, 25 one year, a season kind of show. They were talking about the creative problem of all that, which is you have these middles of the season where you’re like, “We’ve just got to keep these characters in a stasis for a chunk of time so that we can keep our plot endgame primed for where we wanted to go at the end.” You just don’t want to burn out. One of the things we learned on those shows was, man, every meaningful plot point is so priceless. You just don’t want to over-dole them out too quickly, because you really need them to last. The short episode orders are a joy for like, “No, just do it, do it, do it.” That’s why it’s great.
John: Now, Aline, also, you have a TV development deal. In shows that you’re developing, how early on in the conversation do you know how many episodes they want the show to be? If you’re setting up a pilot, do they already have a discussion of like, “Okay, this needs to be at least eight episodes. It needs to be at least 10.” When does that conversation happen?
Aline: That’s interesting. We have a couple pilots that are moving down the highway at some degree of velocity. We haven’t totally nailed it down yet. I think it might also have to do, at this point, with actors and how much time they want off and need off, and the idea now that actors really do go back and forth between not just TV and film, but multiple TV series, and so setting it up so that the actors… If you get a very famous actor and they have a specific number of episodes that they do or don’t want to do, I imagine that that would factor into it.
I’m interested in the idea, from a crafty point, of how much story you eat, because sometimes you can feel that deliberate slowing of the story eating, because creators don’t want to burn too much, because if you burn too much, you get into soap territory very quickly. One of the mini-series I have most admired recently, and by admired I mean was obsessed with, The Dropout. In The Dropout they eat a tremendous amount of story in the pilot. At the end of that pilot, you think, my god, I have been through so much already. I admire that, because it’s giving you the amount of story that you might get in a movie really at that point. Then I think we’ve all gotten to the place where we are accustomed to those episodes, which as Dan said, are between Episodes 4 and 7, where it seems like we’re going to do a flashback episode about the first time this person learned how to use a payphone. That’s going to be the whole episode.
John: We’ve been talking about TV, but I really want to focus on features this time, because you guys are both in the middle of making features for screenwriters. We’ll start with Doug and Dan. Chip ‘n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers, this was obviously a passion project from a very young age. You always dreamed of making a Chip ‘n’ Dale.
Doug: It actually was. It was my favorite cartoon. I have drawings from my childhood that my parents dug up of me cosplaying the Rescue Rangers in different outfits.
John: That’s amazing. Rescue Rangers is not even something that’s on my radar at all. It was very specific. You were just the right age for the Rescue Rangers to be a thing.
Doug: It’s an old, mid-old millennial kind of niche. All of those cartoons aired on the Disney afternoon, which was right when you’d come home from school. They were on repeat. You’d see these episodes hundreds of times, and so you memorized them.
John: It wasn’t the kind of IP where it was like everyone in the world was like, “Oh my god, we have to make a Rescue Rangers movie.”
Dan: That’s why they came to us.
Doug: Exactly.
John: When did they come to you, Doug, to do this?
Doug: I just did a timeline, just because it’s coming out and I just wanted to look at it. They came to us in I guess maybe the beginning of 2015. They were like, “We’re thinking about doing this.”
John: Who is they that came to you?
Doug: It was Louie Provost over at Disney, who is still there, which is a miracle that we had the same executive, and Mandeville Pictures. We had done some work with both of them. We had had meetings with them. They were like, “We think you guys would be great for this.” Our initial response was, “Why? Maybe not.”
Dan: What you’re saying exactly, which is like, does anyone even know who they are? It’s so niche. Even to me, who was obsessed with it for a little period of time, it was again the fourth-most important out of four cartoons. It’s really not a big deal.
Doug: It was, I think, a big deal in our career too. We weren’t getting a lot of IP brought to us. To Disney’s credit and to Mandeville’s credit, they were very much like, “Come to us with anything, any version of it.” Dan and I started talking about it. We took the essence of the why even do this and put that within the picture of the film.
Dan: The original title of the movie was The Chip ‘n’ Dale’s Reboot That Nobody Asked For.
John: How many years ago was this?
Doug: 2015 was our first pitch.
John: This is way before Disney Plus.
Doug: This was sold as a feature.
John: A Disney feature film.
Doug: Exactly. We were both scratching our heads. We pitched this movie that was a noir and had elements of LA Confidential in it.
Dan: Just to give the premise of it really quickly, it’s basically Chip and Dale are these two chipmunks, who in the early ’90s, this Disney afternoon, they would basically do what’s happening right now, which is they would repurpose old Disney characters, put them in new outfits, new adventures, give them new personalities. This was one of them. Chip and Dale were Donald Duck’s foils in the ’50s, ’60s. They were just nonspeaking chipmunks who ate peanut butter.
Doug: They were background actors or secondary actors. We play them as actors who played these roles.
Dan: They basically get put into… The concept is that they are the actors who played the Rescue Rangers in this early ‘90s sitcom. Now it is 30 years later. They are washed up actors, over the hill. In a Tropic Thunder, Three Amigos kind of storyline, they get embroiled in a real world mystery plot, very reminiscent of a Roger Rabbit kind of world.
John: Great. There’s some animation, but it’s mostly a live action feature.
Dan: It’s live action hybrid. It’s as much as it could be a hybrid as possible, because it’s as if cartoons are real people who live in real Hollywood and the real world, like Roger Rabbit.
John: Roger Rabbit rules.
Dan: Exactly.
John: Fantastic. You have this idea. You’re pitching it to Disney. They’re saying, “Fantastic. That’s great.” The feature version of that is incredibly expensive, the theatrical feature, not only to make it, but also to release it. What happens?
Dan: There are so few slots. We’re writing this, and we’re like, “They’re not going to make this movie.”
John: Yeah, because there’s always going to be a princess movie to make.
Doug: There’s a princess movie, and then there’s the Marvel movies that you have to contend with.
Doug: Star Wars, all of it.
Dan: Again, this is a movie that like, do people really need to see… Are people clamoring to see this, when they have four Thors to make? We’re writing it and we’re really enjoying it, and the response is really positive. That’s not always the case, even when you’re proud of something. Eventually it gets to the place of-
Dan: It just peters out, because they’re trying to figure out how could this be a much bigger four-quadrant movie. We’re like, “That’s just not what this is. It’s a weird offbeat comedy wrapped in a mystery.” Then it just peters out and it just sits dormant.
John: It becomes dormant and eventually gets [crosstalk 00:16:16].
Dan: It gets put on the shelf, but to their credit, which you don’t always get, our producers at Mandeville were big fans. Somewhere they met Akiva Schaffer…
Doug: Akiva Schaffer.
Dan: …who’s wildly funny and a great director…
Doug: From the Lonely Island.
Dan: …from the Lonely Island. They were like, “He might be good for this.” They show him the script. He laughs at the title, The Rescue Rangers Reboot That No One Wants. He reads it and he’s like, “I do like this.” At this point, Disney Plus exists now. The combination of those two things gave it new life. Akiva was like, “I’m interested in this.” Disney was excited about him and the idea that maybe you could make a movie that doesn’t have to be-
John: The pressure’s off of it, because it doesn’t have to open on a weekend and make $8 million.j
Doug: It doesn’t have to be a four-quadrant, like Dan is saying, in the same way.
John: Aline, I want to talk to you about your film, because talk about movies they don’t make anymore or movies that’d be hard to make. What was the origin story for Your Place Or Mine? It feels like the kind of romantic comedy that used to be made theatrically a lot, and now it’s harder to make. How did this movie get set up?
Aline: The origin story was that in 2010 when we were making Morning Glory, I needed a place to stay in New York because my per diem wasn’t really covering all of it. Our friend Ted Griffin had a lovely apartment in New York I knew that he wasn’t using full-time, so I asked him if I could stay there. He was living such a bachelor life at the time, that I really enjoyed being a mom in a bachelor space. I thought it would be funny to do a movie about two friends, where the mom is living in the bachelor’s space, and the bachelor is living in the mom’s space. I had that idea for a long time. A lot of the ideas that I’ve ended up doing, I carried around in my brain for a long time. Crazy Ex was one too. What I do is I cradle these little puppies in my arms, and then I wait for someone that I want to raise the puppy with.
My old friend Michael Costigan partnered with Jason Bateman. They had a deal with Netflix, which I think originated around the Ozark series. I had breakfast with them at John Benny’s. It was similar to when I met Rachel and as I was talking to Rachel I went, “You know what? Crazy Ex, she’s going to dig it.” At this breakfast I said to Jason and Michael… I pitched them the idea. They really loved it. The setting up process was, because they had this relationship with Netflix, we just went to Netflix and told the story to our exec at the time, Sarah Bowen, who’s no longer there. It was really easy and straightforward. I didn’t do what I normally have done with pitches, which is to go everywhere and sit in a million rooms. That was a great relief. The development process, the style of development was very different. I don’t actually know to what… I know that part of that is the culture of these streamers. Part of it is the individuals that I was working with. It was a more straightforward, business-like process in an interesting way.
John: Did you feel like when you made your deal at Netflix that it was a deal to develop a script or basically like, “We’re going to have you write the script and we’re probably going to make it.”
Aline: It did feel more like that. We who have been doing this screenwriting gig for a long time have sold in a number of different configurations. Sometimes you’re pitching stuff and everyone’s going, “I don’t know. We’ll give this a shot. Let’s see what happens.” Sometimes you’re writing in a situation where they have an actor, they’re in a rush. They need to do it. You think it might get made. It’s your football to drop. In this case, there was a feeling that they wanted to do romantic comedies that were with stars, maybe bigger stars on the platform. That was the design of it. I felt like that was something that they had identified a need for. As a writer, that’s always the best situation to be in.
What Dan and Doug are describing is you’re making a dish that wasn’t necessarily ordered, in which case the dish has to be that much better. When you’re making a dish that has been ordered, with Devil Wears Prada, not only had that dish been ordered, but people were banging on the table saying, “Where is it?” There’s a relationship between your product and your project and their appetite, but a really great script can overcome what might be a natural disinclination towards the project, which is what Dan and Doug overcame with the inventiveness of their writing.
John: Dan and Doug, it sounds like, holding this metaphor of the dish no one ordered, it was like, “Oh, this is really, really good. We have nothing we can do with it.” Then the world changed, and suddenly, oh, there’s actually a place that this would be perfect for. It sounds like the kinds of movies that Aline likes to make and this idea that she had… Aline, your movie would’ve been hard to set up at a conventional studio, unless you’d actually already had those big actors attached, correct?
Aline: That’s correct. Even then, because it was a star-dependent movie, we had to then get stars. One of the things about being a writer is it’s a fast-moving river. It’s always been. It is now more than ever. The number of buyers, who’s buying, what they’re looking for, it changes really quickly. It’s also interesting, as I said, for John and I, who came up in a quite calcified system where there were only certain types of jobs. I know that people are bemoaning the lack of predictability and consistency in the marketplace right now, but I think there’s a way to look at that as opportunities. When there is this transitional stuff happening, there are people who need certain kind of content. If you can identify who’s looking for what, then you can figure out who wants to buy your particular brand of pierogis.
Dan: Also, something you were saying about cradling your puppies, even more so, nothing’s ever really dead. That’s the other part that is… It’s heartbreaking when things seem like they go away or they die, but they never really do. They’re always gestating in your mind. They’re gestating in the larger business. There very well might be another time where it just makes sense to come back to life in a totally different iteration or a different concept.
John: We’re going to have a question later on that’s really about that, when do ideas actually just come back, or do you just wait for the right time for that idea to come back. Let’s talk about, in addition to the studio features we’ve made, you’ve also made indie features. I’m thinking about Most Likely To Murder, which to me feels like a movie that if it had come out in a streaming time, probably would’ve gone to streaming and it would have had a better home.
Dan: That was a movie that we… I wish that it got more clear traction. I think if it had been made for a Netflix, it would’ve been something that made a lot of sense. We made it. We did it for Lionsgate, but without a clear plan. They were just launching a thing called Studio L, a wisp in the wind, that no one really has any idea what the hell that is anymore. For a moment they were like, “We’re going to make digital movies.” Also they were trying to make straight-to-video comedies. That was not what we were making. It didn’t even really fit in their business model. We ended up selling it as part of a deal to Hulu, but it didn’t get the launch that I think it would’ve gotten if it was something that-
John: My movie The Nines, we debuted at Sundance, had a big debut there, sold off of that. It went to theatrical, but it was just like it never found that home. Two years later, if it had gone to Sundance, a streamer would’ve bought and it would’ve showed up on a streamer, and I could say, “Oh, it’s on Netflix,” or I could point to where they could see it. People tweet at me now, it’s like, “Where can I see your movie?” You could download it on iTunes. It’s frustrating.
Doug: You can buy it on Amazon, which is sort of something, but it’s not-
Dan: The deal with Hulu just ran out, so we’re [crosstalk 00:24:01].
Aline: Side note is that Doug Mand delivers an incredibly hilarious performance in that movie. If you want to see Doug Mand on screen in a film, he’s really funny.
Dan: With one of the more egregiously terrible facial hair performances in history.
Doug: It’s more my facial hair that’s doing the performance and I’m just along for the ride.
John: Dan, you brought up straight-to-video. I had forgotten that term, weirdly, because it just-
Dan: It doesn’t mean anything anymore.
John: That was the equivalent I think of what we’re talking about with streamers, like different genres there. You could make a movie for theatrical or you could make a movie for straight-to-video. There was a pejorative quality saying something goes straight to video. There were things that that was the right place to put that genre of film.
Dan: There’s something great about, again, the marketplace of content now, where yeah, if you want to make a small movie for a particular audience, then great, that’s fine. That’s part of the market.
John: I want to wrap up this part of the conversation by talking about a thing that is different about the actual features or straight to video is really the back end, because there was a clear model for what the back end was going to be like for movies that were made for the actual release or made for home video, because there were residuals. There was ways that you could make your money out of these things. We can share as much as we want to share about what are deals are looking like for this. Aline, for your movie, I hope it’s a huge, ginormous success. I hope that Netflix takes out those little ads saying how big it is, like how Ryan Reynolds’s movies are so big. That won’t impact your financials very much at all. I see you shaking your head. As you are making your deal going into it, are you trying to account for that? How are you thinking about that?
Aline: They gave me an opportunity to direct a movie with big stars and adequate resources. I think in the long run that will benefit me, if you’re looking at the bottom line, which I don’t tend to do that much, but it will benefit me that way. That’s really how I think about that one. With Cruella, it was an outgrowth of the pandemic that it got released day and date during the pandemic. I ended up getting the best upfront definition, because it was on whatever you call pan-demand, which is our best definition. It was day and date with the release. Obviously, the release was depressed by the pandemic. That ended up having a backend that I just didn’t expect.
I think that that’s going to change and evolve and will probably be driven somewhat by actors, because I think the upfront money might evolve as these companies have more data about what the revenue is actually accruing to them from these packages, because right now it’s guesswork. The actors have been, as with Scarlett and Disney, the actors have been on the forefront of trying to figure out exactly how much money these folks are making and trying to draft off of that. My personal thing didn’t impact me that much, but I can see coming up Prada and 27 Dresses happened to come out in the middle of the DVD boom.
John: Your residuals on those movies but be absurd.
Doug: God bless.
Dan: Oh boy.
Doug: Just make it public, Aline. Let’s open the books up.
Dan: Just write it down and show us.
John: I don’t want to nail you down to a dollar figure, but [crosstalk 00:27:16].
Aline: It’s a lot.
John: Millions of dollars.
Aline: They were right in that zone. Really what money means for a writer is time to do stuff you love. Those were so meaningful to me early in my career in terms of, hey, I’m going to take a break and do Crazy Ex, which was a pay cut for me in certain respects, because I have a pretty steady residual stream. All these new models are going to affect writers in terms of the kinds of choices they can make. I will say that the opportunities that streamers have almost everyone that came up in my generation to do things that they’d always wanted to do, that there wasn’t necessarily outlets to make in either the network television or the traditional studio, which seemed to take turns being the sausage factory. It used to be that TV was grinding out mid-range hot dogs and then it was features that were doing that and then the TV became fancy and now it feels like there’s a little bit of a shift going underway. All of those changes that you have to track as a writer, in my particular case I was balancing the fact that they were giving me a great opportunity with I wouldn’t get the backend.
Dan: Rescue Rangers, we signed the deal as a theatrical and so there was no discussion of it whatsoever. There’s a writing credit.
Doug: The writing credit bonus.
Dan: The writing credit bonus…
Doug: [Inaudible 00:28:42].
Dan: …that we’ll get when this comes out. I don’t know when we’ll actually get it. Even all that stuff, the movie was in this weird little flux where it was all of a sudden going well, and then there was a moment where they were discussing, “Maybe we will switch it to theatrical.” Then COVID happened. Then they were like, “Nobody’s ever going to go to the movies again.” They started just assuming it was going to be Disney Plus again. Then they started signing all of the actors to Disney Plus, to streaming-only contracts. All of a sudden they got to a point where they’re like, “Oh, we’re back in a world where there is theatrical.” Now we couldn’t even switch back to theatrical if they wanted, because they can’t renegotiate the contract now.
John: It’s a weird time.
Aline: I know some people who made movies just pre-streamer to be in either independent films or festival films and then tried desperately to sell them to a streamer, and in certain instances it was too complicated to do that. They had to watch their movies come out and plunge like zeppelins that’d been stabbed with a pencil. I think streamers are really great for getting movies out there that are just not being made in any other way. I guess that’s probably the most banal statement I could possibly make. There’s just such a huge menu, budget range of things that are being made. It’s almost more like silent films, where they were cranking out, we’re going to make a Tom mix, we’re going to make a romance, we’re going to adapt Lady Chatterley’s Lover, we’re going to do a whole mix of things. John and I will tell you, features for a good 8 to 10 years were not that. It was a very, very limited menu and a very limited genre area that we were given to work in.
John: Let’s transition back to TV, because we have some questions from our listeners that you guys are incredibly well suited to answer. Megana, can you help us out with Christopher’s question here.
Megana: Christopher asks, “A recent deadline article on the 2022 pilot season cited networks as increasingly opting for, quote, ‘presentations’ instead of filming pilots. I’m familiar with this practice for unscripted shows, and to a lesser extent, one-hour dramas, but I’ve never encountered it before for sitcoms. I know John has some experience with the mechanics of a presentation from his DC show with the WB, but I can’t find anything about what a presentation would look like for a sitcom, especially a network sitcom which is already only around 22 minutes long.”
John: Doug, can you talk to us about… Didn’t you do a presentation for your show?
Doug: We did not. That show Pretty Smart for Netflix was a pitch. They saw a place for it. It made sense for their schedule.
John: Did you shoot a pilot or you shot series?
Doug: We went right to series.
Aline: Weirdly enough, I’ve done one.
John: Talk about presentation, Aline.
Aline: I did a presentation, I’m going to say 20 years ago, or maybe even more. It’s a fancy word for no money, to make a scratch track. It’s a bummer. It’s really hard.
Dan: It goes right in the trash. That’s the worst part is you make it, and it’s usually under different contracts, or a lot of the time it’s just different crews. It doesn’t even look the way that the show would look. It’s just a proof of concept.
Doug: This is how we got our break really. It’s where I think presentation should be, which is myself, Dan, and Adam Pally, all best friends, still are, and we had an idea for a sitcom, and then we went out with our own money, none of us had representation, and shot a cold open for the show and an opening credit sequence at under a thousand dollars and then sent it to everyone we knew. That was a proof of concept. I think that’s what presentation should be, as opposed to doing 22 minutes. Better to do like, give me that money and let me show you an example of, for a sitcom, what the comedy feels like, what these characters are like.
Dan: Our next one, we paired with a producer who financed a presentation. They financed maybe a 12-minute presentation for a half-hour sitcom. It was one of those things where again it was super useful. We still ended up selling it to the CW. Before, they were looking to only do dramas, but then Crazy Ex broke that cycle. It was super helpful. They’re great. It’s a lot of work and a lot of money.
Doug: You can’t say that this is what 22 minutes is going to look like, because you’re asking me to do it at a third of the cost, maybe even less. I don’t like the idea of them shifting to that, because that’s just saying let’s just squeeze out as much money as we can. I’d rather say give me that budget and let us do six minutes of the show.
John: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, that was famously a presentation where they shot it themselves. It was a proof of concept for, this is the chemistry between these guys, this is the idea, and that could change everything, as opposed to DC, when I taught that presentation, the idea was that it was a cheaper pilot, so basically you had your pilot script and then you would pick certain screens from that pilot script and have only those. We were shooting things that had to fit back into the original pilot. It was the worst of both worlds. The only thing I would say was helpful for that-
Doug: Wait, I’m sorry, so like Scene 1, Scene 5, Scene 12.
John: Yeah.
Dan: They wanted to use it. If they were going to make a show, they were like, we’re not going back and shooting this.
John: There you go.
Doug: That’s even more make-believe, isn’t it?
Dan: That is all the [crosstalk 00:34:02].
Aline: It’s such a vote of semi-confidence too. It’s like you match with someone on Hinge, and instead of going to dinner with them, you’re like, “I’ll meet you for coffee 15 minutes at 9 a.m.” They’re not going into it with… It’s such a meh. It’s so hard to make things even when everyone is so enthusiastic. When we did it, it just also allowed them to change things and give crazy notes. We ended up with an 11-minute presentation that is one of the craziest documents in my career everywhere. It’s somewhere in there, that closet, on a VCR cassette. It was bonkers. It’s in a weird way better to wait until people really care about what you’re doing and can give you a little support. It also strikes me as hilarious. You know how you can never explain to your parents what you do?
Doug: Oh, god.
Aline: Try explaining a pilot presentation to your parents.
Dan: I will say I think for corporations, shifting the development process towards that is stupid and ridiculous and it’s just a weird way to not pay as much money. I will say this forever. If you can get a little bit of your own money together to make your own pilot presentation, I do think a well-made piece of film can go much farther than a script can sometimes for someone on the come-up.
Doug: Especially if you’re not established.
John: [inaudible 00:35:25] Adam Pally on it. That can show his-
Doug: Exactly. We had an unknown Ellie Kemper in that presentation, at the time, she hadn’t booked anything at that point, and a bunch of people who ended up doing great things. This is always the advice we give to up-and-coming writers is to go out, find your community, and shoot things. It’s hard to get people to read your writing if know one knows you.
Aline: Now you can put them on TikTok. TikToks can go up to five minutes now.
John: There you go.
Dan: Basically a feature.
Aline: You can make something great with your friends and put it on TikTok.
John: Megana, what else do you have for us?
Megana: Jeffery asks about writing gender-agnostic characters. He says, “In my work in progress, my two main characters are women, and I want to encourage gender-neutral casting for everyone else. When describing what these characters do, I’m toying with the idea of using they pronouns for them. For example, Senator McMartin rushes in late for the news conference. They step to the mic, only to spot their former business partner in the front row. Do you think this would be a good general approach to avoid using a default he/she, or do I risk getting a reader who thinks I don’t know how to write? Would this be worth using a reader’s note before the script begins?”
John: Before we discuss this, I want us each to vote, good idea or bad idea. Dan, good idea, bad idea?
Dan: Bad idea.
John: Doug?
Doug: I lean towards bad idea.
John: Aline?
Aline: I lean towards an explanatory note.
Doug: Didn’t vote, Aline. I would’ve leaned towards that too if I knew that was an option, Aline.
Aline: Really political over here today.
John: I’m going to vote bad idea. I’ll give my context and then everyone can weigh in. I totally respect what Jeffery’s trying to do, but I also think that in 2022 they/them pronouns is for characters who identify as not being on the gender binary. To throw up your hands like, “I don’t care,” is actually worse in some ways. I think as a writer you’re making a choice about who you’re putting in there. You cannot be as specific as you want to be if you’re not actually even deciding with the gender of this character is. That’s my instinct here.
Dan: Thank you for taking the lead on that, John.
Aline: Sorry, the question is how do I leave it open to as many types… You can say Officer Rao, and then in parentheses you can say male, female, or nonbinary, parentheses. Then you can say, “I will be using he,” so that they know that… I’m assuming they’re trying to keep it open, not write a nonbinary character, because obviously those would be different things. If you want to encourage them to keep it open, you can give them a gender-neutral name and then note that it could be played by…
Dan: I also want to know when I’m reading someone, especially I haven’t read before, what they envision the character to be. I think that’s okay to do. Then when casting discussions come around, you can always pull back and go, “You know what? This could actually be XYZ and I didn’t think about that.” I think specificity helps. You’re painting a picture for these people with your words.
Doug: Specificity’s everything. It’s everything.
Dan: It becomes more obtuse and more like, okay. It’s a choose your own adventure of like, oh, this is who I’m going to imagine then.
John: Exactly. It’s hard to put that scene in your head if you don’t know what am I even looking at, who is this person. A line is going to read differently from this character versus that character.
Dan: Completely. It’s a non-decision in your script.
Aline: I disagree. I think there’s a lot of times, especially when you’re writing a smaller part, that you can write parentheses, any gender, or parentheses, any ethnicity, so that you’re leaving it open. We’ve done that. We did that a lot.
John: Certainly for characters that basically have essentially no lines, and they’re purely functional, sure, great. You’re doing that sporadically. As Jeffery’s describing, encourage gender-neutral casting for everyone else, you can encourage that when you hand in the script, but you cannot just write that in on the page.
Dan: It’s fine to put a note that says, “Hey, whoever finances and makes this project, please cast openly with gender-neutral casting as much as possible.” It just seems a little cart before the horse. It doesn’t belong in the body of the script in my mind.
John: Also, generally, I think by choosing not to make a choice, if you have a social goal in mind for this, you could make some choices to make some of these roles female that would not always be female, or could be nonbinary that would not otherwise be. Specificity there can actually push your gender forward. Megana, what else do you have for us?
Megana: Great. Margaret asks about page density. She says, “I have a rom-com that is currently 104 dense pages. I snipped and squooshed and killed orphans to get to that svelte size, but now I’m wondering if more white space would make it a more enjoyable read. Do you think slenderness in the hand, measured by number of pages, or ease of quick reading is more important? If the latter, do you have any thoughts about how to put a dense script on a white-space-expanding diet? Where would the extra space be most useful, margins or between lines or everywhere? Nowhere do I have more than four lines of action or description or dialog, but still it looks dense.”
Aline: I’m going to quote Craig Mazin here, which is the return key is your friend. I never do a line of description more than… Rarely more than two, but definitely not more than three.
John: If you read through a bunch of scripts, there’s a wide range of stuff. There’s not one perfect thing to do for this. Judy Kay, don’t change the margins. Don’t try to make your margins bigger. That’s not going to help anybody. Also look at maybe what kind of script are you writing? If you’re writing a script with a lot of dialog, there’s going to be some natural white space there anyway, just because the margins have set in for that. I worry you may be worrying about the wrong things.
Dan: Look, my feeling on page stuff is that it’s purely a psychological tool for the person who’s receiving the script. We’ve all made enough scripts to know that the page count is functionally meaningless. Our shooting script for Rescue Rangers was 175 pages. The actual practical thing, when they re-transcribe the thing you’ve actually put on screen, every little um, eh, huh, it becomes 175 pages, but the movie’s 90 minutes. It doesn’t mean anything, the page count really. It’s just the way that people will receive it in development. Do they feel like it moves? Do they feel like it flows? Does it feel too heavy in their hand? It’s just that dumb stuff. I go home on my weekend read and they have a pile of six screenplays. They’re going to go to the thinnest one first, because they don’t want to take more time.
Aline: It’s a sales document, you’re right. If you open it and you see big, chunky, 10-line paragraphs, you’re like, “No, I’m not in the mood for that.”
John: 100%.
Doug: I don’t want to be prescriptive on it either, but I do think that first page… If I see a first page that is all scene direction, and I like reading… If there’s anything, I’d be like, look at those first couple pages and see what can you thin out to draw the reader in.
Dan: There’s nothing worse than the actions… We’ve done a lot of action movies, a lot of action movie rewrites. When you come in on an action movie where you’re seeing just pages and pages of the action described, you’re telling me the kind of machine gun they’re using, I don’t care. It’s a slog of a read. It’s not particularly interesting. It’s never character-forwarding. That’s probably the biggest thing is that it’s very-
Doug: Character or story.
Dan: Exactly. It just becomes meaningless details. It’s not fun. It’s not a good read.
Aline: I think from a writing standpoint, don’t you guys also think that most of the mistakes people make is too much stuff, not not enough stuff? A lot of times when you’re reading it, it’s like, she’s got a purple T-shirt and a button-down and Levis, and she walks over to the car and she opens it with her right hand. You’re like, which of those things do I care about? Which one of those are you pointing out? You can figure out what color the car is and what shoes they’re wearing later if the important thing is that she’s right-handed because later someone’s going to get stabbed with a left-handed knife or something. That’s what you have to highlight. I think beginning writers often, and I would include myself as a beginning writer for sure, there’s just a tonnage of extraneous detail, because you’re trying to show how beautifully and exquisitely you’ve imagined everything. You can’t do that. It’s like lighting. You’re trying to direct everyone’s attention to exactly where you want it to be.
Dan: You just said it. It’s directing. When you get late in a process and you’re having production meetings and you need to get every single detail in someone’s head, that’s the time to really get granular. Most of that stuff doesn’t need to be in there. You’re just trying to give a vibe a lot of the time.
Doug: You have to ask yourself what matters, I guess. If you’re telling me about the clothing, this is a person who just wears yellow, or you’re telling me what hand they use to open the door, do they have a broken right arm so they have to use their left. I think you have to ask yourself those questions of does this really affect the story, the character. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t need to be there, most likely.
John: Megana, another question for us?
Megana: JJ asks, “On a recent episode, John mentioned how near impossible it is to get a musical going at the moment. I have a musical out to buyers right now, and it’s been a lot of passes so far. The feedback has all been positive. People love the script, but more than a handful of buyers have said they simply can’t get a musical across the line right now. I wrote it in 2019 before the unsuccessful theatrical runs of a few notable musicals changed the landscape. My question is, what do you do when a script that excited agents, producers, and the director at the time it was written is ready to hit the market at a less than friendly time for the genre? Is a second chance possible a few years down the road? Is it dead? I’m very bummed at the moment and not too optimistic about the remaining places we are out to. Has this ever happened to either of you before?”
John: Yeah, this just happened to be. JJ could basically be just me writing. I did take a musical out. We basically went to all the streamers. Going into it, I’d heard musicals are really tough because of Dear Evan Hansen, because of West Side Story not working, but also just a whole slew of things, and so that certain streamers are saying no. They didn’t want to hear a pitch, because they said no. Other places, like, “Oh, we’re excited to hear the pitch.” I go in, it’s like, “It’s just so good. No, we can’t do a musical. I can’t get this approved,” which is heartbreaking but it feels [crosstalk 00:45:40].
Doug: You told me this the other day, and my heart sunk, because I am in the thick of a musical that I sold with Rachel Bloom to Amazon. On the other part of the subject, this is a movie that Rachel and I had developed a handful of years ago, took it out to all the places that do this stuff, all nos. We were like, “All right, it’s dead.” Then several years later, there was an executive shakeup at Amazon. The junior exec who loved it got promoted. His boss left. He had a new boss. He was like, “I have different directives. I’ve been thinking about this movie for years. Are you guys still open to do it with me?” We were like, “Yeah.” It again came back to life in this way that we had totally put it to bed. We’re in the thick of developing a musical for Amazon. I hope that all these things are conditional, because I would like for it to be a real movie.
John: It sounds like your movie’s already a little bit set up at a place. That definitely helps. It’s already in the track. Whether it’ll get that green light is the question.
Doug: Exactly.
John: You also have the track record of you and Rachel working on it. It also reminds me of Rescue Rangers, which is basically like there was a moment in which this was the way, the place that we could make it, and then it just goes away again. With musicals, we are just putting a pin in it. We will revisit after… There’s musicals that are in the pipe right now that could be huge hits.
Aline: It’s original musicals that are the problem, because Mamma Mia, Glee, things that draw on existing songs do way, way better. Having backed ourselves against the wall with this, with Crazy Ex, the thing I will share, when we were testing the Crazy Ex pilot, Rachel starts singing 10 minutes in. When you test TV, you have dials. The episode starts, and people are into it. People always responded extremely well to Rachel. People are enjoying the pilot. You can see the enjoyment line going up, up, up, up, up. There’s a scene she quits her job. Then the second she starts singing, when I’m telling you nosedive, it was as if everyone in the testing had just yanked their dial to zero. I remember turning to Rachel and saying, “That’s a traditional show tune, so maybe that’s why.” Then later in the episode there’s an R and B song with a rap solo in it, which has Rachel in her underwear for most of it. Same thing, they’re loving it, the dial’s really high. The second people start singing, the whole audience cranks it to the left.
If you looked at it, audiences have an innate allergy to songs they haven’t heard before in that format. I’m not sure why that is. It is a humongous overcome. If you’re doing Bohemian Rhapsody or the Elton John movie or Mamma Mia, people get excited when they hear those songs. I wonder if there’s ever a world where you take the Olivia Rodrigo album, and before you even release it as an album, you already have some sort of script ready to go so that once that becomes a hit, you have something that you can put into production with existing songs that are already a hit. It has to be a hit somewhere else in order to live in a comfortable… It’s very, very difficult. While our show had a certain cult status, we were for many, many months the lowest rated show on network television.
Doug: I don’t know if we were going to get to this before. I think it’s all connected in terms of when you let go of a project after you’ve made it and maybe it has been passed on. To talk about Rescue Rangers for a second, something that Dan and I actually haven’t spoken about that much is the idea of open writing assignments and doing free work. We were brought in on a different open writing assignment and asked to do free work, being like, “What’s your take on this property?” We spent a lot of time breaking out a take. We were like, “Why would we do this? This is such a long shot anyway.” We really liked the take. Then they passed on it. Then when Rescue Rangers came around, we were like, “There are some parts of this that are helpful.”
I think that it just goes to show that… There was a feeling of like, all that work was for absolutely nothing. I don’t think that’s ever the case. That’s the bit of silver lining in it. This is not to tell people to go out and do free work ad nauseum. There is an aspect of like, oh, that came back. That’s not done. It doesn’t have to be someone else green-lighting the same, exact thing. There were elements of it that we were like, “Let’s look back at that,” and be like, “There are elements that we can pitch for the Rescue Rangers and create around them.” That was very rewarding, because we’ve done so much. We all have done pitching on things that never went anywhere, never got paid to do. That time spent developing an idea is not a wasted time.
John: I’ll say that this musical that I wasn’t able to get set up, I did have 12 good meetings with places, and I have relationships with those places that I didn’t before. I didn’t get the thing going, but at least I know which of those executives I like. I definitely know which executives I will never, ever, ever work with. There’s a list of two or three people I kept telling my agents, “I will never work with her.”
Doug: Great.
John: That was good too.
Doug: Also, there’ll be a hit musical in five years.
John: Exactly.
Doug: All of a sudden there’ll be a boom for musicals, and then this’ll come back to life.
John: The two things that are in production right now that will come out soon. There’s 13 at Netflix, which could be great, but no one knows the songs. Then Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell have a movie for Apple TV Plus, a Christmas Carol story, which is-
Aline: The two-part Wicked movie.
John: The two-part Wicked movie will also happen. That’s already known properties. On the animation side, I have Toto, which is a musical, but it’s also animation, which has special rules.
Aline: It has special rules. With respect to the projects, you have that, you own that. That’s in your computer and in your brain. My company is called Lean Machine, but I often had this joke that I was going to call it Dead Horse Productions because if I believe in it, I will drag it around indefinitely. A lot of the things that I’ve gotten made are things that I just would not give up on. Crazy Ex was one of those. Every single television network that you’ve ever heard of has passed on it multiple times. I am a big believer, it’s a good idea… John, you’ll be sitting at [inaudible 00:52:10] with someone and they’ll say, “I’m looking for this.” You’ll say, “That’s funny, because I happen to have one of those.”
John: It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a television show which I loved when it came out. My daughter had never seen it. We watched the pilot to Lost this past week.
Doug: Oh my god, [crosstalk 00:52:27]. We got to talk about this.
Dan: We were just talking about it.
Doug: I actually have this debate constantly. I’m sorry to interrupt your One Cool Thing.
John: I believe the pilot to Lost holds up remarkably well, incredibly well. I’m going to put a link in the show notes to the pilot script for it, which I never actually read. It’s very, very dense on the page. It’s not what I would normally like to read. It’s so good. It includes a bunch of scenes that are dropped out of the show. As I was watching it, I was just noting the act breaks in it and how long before we get to that first act being done. It’s just a genius thing. I feel like in many ways, the same… Aliens was the script that I always kept going back to to look at how you write action. I feel like people should need to look at the Lost pilot script again just in terms of how you do that show, because I’ve seen so many versions of that show that are trying to be the Lost pilot. The Lost pilot is just so much better, so smartly done.
Dan: The Lost pilot is spectacular. There’s so many episodes of that show that are spectacular. Can you divorce the ending from any other part of it? This is my fear and feeling, that the ending abandons so many of the things that were needed and asked of the audience that I don’t think it’s a fair ask to start it.
John: To start watching Lost?
Dan: I don’t think it’s appropriate.
John: Oh my gosh. I think Lost is an absolute delight. I encourage people to watch Lost. You cannot watch Lost without watching the Lost pilot. Really, what I’m encouraging everyone to do is just watch the Lost pilot. It’s on Hulu right now.
Dan: It’s a great pilot. It’s going nowhere, guys.
Doug: It goes somewhere for a very long time.
Dan: It leads to nothing.
Doug: I don’t completely agree with that.
Dan: It’s a winding road down into a dirt pit.
Doug: You might be sending your daughter down a path that will be ultimately depressing and unsatisfying, but that journey is fantastic.
John: I had David Lindelof on the show. One of the things he says is the the experience of people who watch Lost all at once is so different than the experience that we had watching it week after week. Things like when there’s two characters who get trapped in a jail thing for six weeks or something, six episodes I think, it’s excruciating, but the people who watched those episodes all together, it was like, oh, that actually tracks and makes a lot of sense. I do feel like a person who’s watching Lost now is getting a very different experience than we did having it strung out over the course of-
Dan: Also, they have access to all the spoilers immediately. Maybe that’s to the benefit, where the what’s in the box question isn’t as loaded, because they know where this is going. They’re signing up for it.
John: The single best cold open ever on an episode was when you get inside the hatch for the first time.
Dan: Oh my god, I think about that all the time. It’s seared into my brain. I’m like, “We’re going in. We’re going in.”
Doug: I sing that song to myself all the time.
Dan: Exactly. Again, I was just so obsessed with that show, to the point where it was actually one of the things that I started really connecting with my wife about when we started dating. We went to a Lost exhibit, where they showed us all of the props from the show. I was so deeply, deeply in love. We were getting into all the weird Fibonacci math equation mysteries. Megana remembers that.
Doug: You guys were made for each other.
Dan: There’s a personal aspect to this.
John: Doug, do you have a One Cool Thing for us?
Doug: Yeah, I actually do. It is music-related. It is an app that’s been around I think for a while, but no one ever seems to know it when I talk about it. It’s called Radioooo with four O’s. It’s world music that is really fun. The music is curated by country and decade. You just go on and you can either let them pick randomly for you… This morning, I was driving my daughter to school. We were listening to music from Angola in the 1980s, and she loved it. You’re discovering things that you’re not getting on your Discover Weekly. It goes all the way from 1900 to 2020. It covers almost every single country in the world. It’s really, really great.
Dan: That’s awesome.
John: Dan, do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us?
Dan: Aline knows that the pandemic, I became a real sauce boy. I love condiments.
Doug: I think he was always a sauce boy.
Aline: Gregor and I were threatening during the pandemic to start an Instagram account called Condimentally Yours.
Doug: We were like, “Wait, is this a full TV show?”
Dan: Condiments, spices, sauces are really my obsession right now. My favorite one-stop shop for Middle Eastern spices, because that’s my favorite cuisine, is New York Shuk.
John: It’s an online store or LA?
Dan: I think it has a brick and mortar in New York, but it’s an online store. It goes all over the world. It’s beautiful packaging, great website. You get your preserved lemons there, your harissa, get your hawaij, get your za’atar. Get all the stuff, baharat, a lot of really important things.
Doug: All things you didn’t know you needed.
Dan: Exactly. A lot of important secondary stuff.
Aline: Gregor and I are both children of sabras, so we have that Middle Eastern stuff in common.
Dan: Exactly. You can even get a harissa spice and just put harissa spice in stuff without the sauce.
John: Harissa’s great.
Dan: Harissa’s great.
John: That’s great.
Dan: I highly recommend you go to New York Shuk, S-H-U-K, and buy their stuff. I’m not being paid.
Doug: You should be.
Dan: I love them.
John: Aline, you have a One Cool Thing for us?
Aline: I do have a One Cool Thing. My One Cool Thing is Megana, because I’ve been listening to… I listened to the 20 questions episodes. I find that I have a little leap of joy in my heart when I know Megana’s going to be on an episode, because I really enjoy hearing from younger writers, and especially younger women. I think there is lots to learn from writers that are older, but I honestly learn so much from not just writers but executives, the people at my company who are younger. I love to hear about what they’re experiencing and what the market looks like for them and how they’re breaking in. I love Megana and Craig. That’s one of my favorite duos. Then Megana and John have their own special magic. I really enjoy it when I have that little leap that you have when you are watching an episode of your favorite TV show and you see that Reese Witherspoon is guest starring on Friends or something. I think Megana is a rather modest person, but she’s actually, I think, inviting a lot of people into Scriptnotes. She works her butt off. Megana, you are my One Cool Thing.
Doug: Wow. What a voice too.
Megana: Oh my gosh. I’m sorry, I have to go. I have to go lie down. I don’t know how to process how happy I am. That’s so nice. Thank you.
Doug: No, we need you. That’s the whole point. We need your voice.
Megana: Thank you so much. That’s so kind, Aline.
Aline: I love it. I wish there had been someone like that when I was a young writer. I wish there had been someone that I could listen to who was also trying to figure out how to put all these pieces together. You’re trying to figure out an entire industry and your own voice at the same time. I was cleaning out some cabinets. I came across a file that I had of original ideas that I was going to pitch. Oh my god. It was so scattershot. I was trying to work in every genre and tone imaginable. They’re insane. I love that period of your life when you’re trying to synthesize all these things. I have kids who are on their way to being grown. My son is graduating from college. I think embracing that time in your life when you’re on the on-ramp… I really love to hear from people like that. It’s been a nice addition to Scriptnotes and the Gen X codgers that we are.
John: That was our show for this week. We are still trying to sort out our schedule. Next week is likely to be a best of episode as we get back onto our normal Tuesday schedule. Scriptnotes is always produced by our amazing Megana Rao, our One Cool Thing Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Pedro Aguilera. 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 as long as I stay on Twitter. Dan, Doug, are you guys on Twitter?
Dan: Yeah, @gregorcorp, C-O-R-P.
Doug: I’m @thedougmand, M-A-N-D.
John: @thedougmand. Aline, you’re using Twitter right now?
Aline: I’m @alinebmckenna.
John: Fantastic.
Aline: You’ll find important things like what is the best Kansas song. I’ve got important things on my Twitter. I really do.
John: Stuff you’d need to know. We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the ones we’re about to record on having a newborn in the house. Aline, Doug, Dan, thank you so much for coming on.
Dan: Thank you.
Doug: Thank you. This was great.
Aline: Woot woot.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Doug and Dan, you have very young kids. Dan, I know your baby was born at the very start of the pandemic.
Dan: Yeah, March 20th.
John: Wow, that’s just right in the heart of it.
Dan: Right at the start.
John: Doug, one kid, two kids? Where are you?
Doug: One child, born end of 2017.
John: A little more experience then on this. You had to be doing a lot of writing work while this new life was living in your house. I want to talk a little bit about becoming a new parent and trying to maintain your career and trying to maintain your life, because I remember when I had our daughter, that first month was just so, so, so bleak. Then the moments where I would try to sneak away and actually write, I felt guilty for abandoning my other half and my child. What are some strategies that, Dan, you’re implementing right now with your kid?
Dan: Honestly, this is a very ritzy strategy, but I have an office in my house. I had the place I would go and work. At a certain point, my daughter turned a cognition corner and no longer lost track of me when I closed a door.
John: Object permanence happened.
Dan: Exactly. She would just bang on the door, just completely just bang until I’d come back out. Working at home became actually impossible. Me and my wife rented a little studio apartment down the street. We’d just walk down the street to go write in this little studio apartment.
John: You throw some goldfish on the floor for your daughter.
Dan: Exactly.
Doug: A big jug of water.
Dan: We put her in a bubble and just let her roll around the house with some water and goldfish. Just a little bit of private space has been by far the thing that has enabled it. I know that’s not necessarily available to everyone. That’s my first advice. Doug, do you have any particulars?
Doug: I do think a room of one’s own is really important to get out. Right before the pandemic, a year before… I have an office as well. My wife is a writer. I would go to a workspace. I loved it. I just loved writing from there. Then coming back home, it was really hard when the pandemic hit, because the guilt is what I felt. I have a garage where I can work out of. The bathroom was inside. I would go in. I’d be like, “No, dad’s not home right now. I’m just here.” There was a guilt. It’s like, you’re home, why aren’t you with your daughter? These are amazing, precious moments. I think if you can create a space, even if that’s, now that the pandemic is not as intense… It’s still quite real. Go somewhere to work. I think that’s helpful.
Also, just be vigilant with your scheduling, just being like, “This is the time that I write.” I think we all waste probably a lot of time not writing when we say we’re writing. If you have an hour, write for an hour. You’ll probably find that you’re getting more done in that time. Don’t beat yourself up for that. Then when you’re with your child, I would say whenever you can not bring your phone in, that’s been a big thing. Your child can sense when you’re not there emotionally. You’re looking at your phone. I try to give my daughter at least 20, 25 minutes where my phone is in another room and I’m just there with her. That makes me feel like not such an absentee father.
John: We’re recording this in the space over my garage. It was an absolute godsend when we had a kid. We would just make a show like, “Papa’s going off to work, bye.” I would walk up the stairs.
Doug: Close the window blinds so she can’t see you.
John: My former assistant, Stuart, was working downstairs. At a certain point she became mobile, and she would come in and talk to Stuart, but she had no idea that I worked upstairs.
Doug: Oh my gosh.
Dan: Oh my gosh.
John: I’d just be very, very quiet. Then eventually she started to wonder, “Why is Papa’s car still here?” It was like, “Oh, he must’ve walked to work.” Not technically a lie. I did walk to work.
Doug: Yes, you did.
John: Eventually, when it became clear, like, “Does Papa work upstairs?” we had a conversation about, “This is workspace. This is home space. You’re basically not allowed up there.”
Dan: The sneaking around my child is the most ludicrous thing. If I have to stop back in during the middle of the day, I will use the backdoor, I will tiptoe. I will pray to God that I am getting out of her line of vision so that she doesn’t see me, because if she sees me in the middle of the day then it’s like, I got put in a half hour.
Doug: At what age did you tell your daughter? Was there any-
John: Blow-back?
Doug: “That’s what’s been going on this whole time.”
John: She was either four or five before she really understood that-
Doug: She still doesn’t know [crosstalk 01:06:14].
John: Then at a certain point, they stop caring completely. Aline, we should talk about… We have older kids now.
Aline: I’m on the other end of it, because my kids are 19 and 22. In case anybody is feeling really guilty about it, I left… A friend of mine gave me an office in his office when my Charlie, my older son, was 18 months old. I always had an office outside the house after that. I have neurotically asked my children many, many times if they felt deprived by having a parent, specifically a mother who was working. They insist that it was fine and they actually liked it. That’s either what they’re saying to me so that I can continue paying their rent or they actually believe that. If you’re used to writing and you’re used to expressing yourself and that makes you happy, in whatever way writing can make you happy, but if that is a form of self-care, just remember that a happy, fulfilled parent is a wonderful thing. Specifically, I hope that moms don’t beat themselves up about finding a workspace for themselves.
Doug: It’s a great thing for your child to see.
Aline: Yeah, is that you’re being productive.
Doug: Yeah, this is Mom working, this is Dad working. It’s also part of life.
Aline: Definitely. One of the things that August and I have in common is a deep love of babies. Man, I love a baby.
John: Oh god, I love babies so much.
Aline: I spend so much time trying to spend time with Gregor and Rachel’s baby, especially during the pandemic, I was getting tested as much as I could so I could go and see her and see them. One time Dan said to Rachel, “Aline does know that this is just a baby, right, and it’s not her baby?”
Dan: I just want to make sure you know.
John: [crosstalk 01:07:55] those contracts like all output isn’t shared.
Dan: Exactly.
John: You’re writing partners.
Dan: Exactly.
Aline: Man, I loved it. It’s nice also, you get to work and you get to go home and have this most magnificent thing to interact with that takes your mind off of work and who doesn’t care that you got notes about you need to dig deeper.
Dan: Doug said this, but a writing day for me, my writing process truly was like, ease in around 11, and then do nothing for 6 hours. Then in my mind I was like, I’m only good at writing for a really intense burst from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. That’s how I lived my whole life. I was like, “I’m a late-night writer.” Boy, that went out the window with a kid. To Doug’s point, it’s just like, no, I’m clocking in. It just got me much better at the idea of clocking in, clocking out. These are my work hours, and I need to be able to make this a functional day job in a very real sense, where it’s like I need to be home by 5:30 to start doing bedtime kid stuff.
Aline: That’s why we did the Crazy Ex room the way we did. We had so many parents. My kids were 10-ish and 13-ish. I’d just want to get out of there. We had a lot of parents in that room. As the show went on, we had more and more. I had learned from my kids being little, yeah, you become much more efficient, and you want to get the eff out of there. We also didn’t do a lot of post-room lingering. It does make you more focused and efficient.
Doug: I would also say, if you don’t have the means, also I really like writing in a library. I had been doing that a lot. There’s something about being around other people working. If it’s not a workspace, there are wonderful libraries in most cities and towns. You really feel like you’re clocking in. I like that feeling of… It’s work that I enjoy. In there you’re really like, “I don’t want to be here all day. I’m going to do an hour and a half, two hours.”
Dan: I don’t want to go the bathroom.
Doug: Yeah, don’t want to go the bathroom and I don’t want to look at… Looking at websites and browsing the internet in the library is a very just gross feeling. You’re just like, “Just let’s write. Let’s just do it.” That’s a resource that a lot of people don’t use.
John: One challenge with being gone for most of the day and coming back at 5, 5:30, that’s often the absolute worst time of day for a kid. That’s often the time when they’re most upset. I think sometimes a vicious cycle happens where you feel bad for being gone all day, but your kid feels bad because it’s 5:30 and they’re hitting unhappy hour, and so you’re the bad parent who’s returned. You may need to adjust your schedules a little bit just so you can get a little bit more happy time with your kid too.
Dan: I haven’t had that yet. Thankfully, she’s still pretty decent at that hour. I’m sure it’ll get worse.
John: It’ll get worse. Thank you guys so much again for this conversation about parenthood.
Doug: Thank you.
Dan: Thank you. Thanks, Aline.
Aline: Thanks, Scriptnotes peeps.
Links:
- Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers May 20th on Disney+
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- Los Angeles Plays Itself
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- Lost Pilot read the script here.
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- Dan Gregor on Twitter
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- Outro by Pedro Aguilera (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
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You can download the episode here.