The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Episode 560 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, we’ll discuss how writers should think about visual effects, both from a creative and budgetary perspective. One of us, Craig, has a lot recent experience in that area.
Craig: Oh boy, do I.
John: We’ll also chat about books, specifically should screenwriters be trying to get the options on them themselves. We’ll discuss formal and less formal arrangements for book options. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we will discuss nightmares. Not metaphorical nightmares like Harvey Weinstein, but actually nightmares occurring during sleep.
Craig, this is your first glance at the topics we’re going to be discussing today. How do you feel about it?
Craig: I feel strong. In particular, I really like this idea of talking about visual effects from the writing point of view, because whether writers realize it or not, they are now as integral to the storytelling process as, I don’t know, lights or microphones.
John: Fundamental. You have lights and microphones upon you, because you were at the Comic Con-
Craig: Segue Man.
John: … presentation panel for Mythic Quest. Craig, how was Comic Con?
Craig: I have no idea, because here’s how it went for me.
John: Tell me.
Craig: Rob McElhenney, he said, “Hey, can you come host this thing? We’re flying down real quick into the little mini San Diego airport. I said, “Okay, I’ll do it.” We fly into the mini San Diego airport. That’s a 35-minute flight. That’s enjoyable. There’s a car. The car takes you to hotel. Then you go from hotel to the back entrance of Comic Con, through the massive back area where the garbage is and the delivery is at. You get herded into a little pen. It’s actually a rather large room. A lovely time before the thing chatting with the cast, who are all wonderful. Then you go on stage, you do this thing. If you’re watching, if you do watch it, I don’t know, on YouTube or something, please understand none of us could hear each other. The microphones are so echoey on stage. I would ask questions and then sort of know what people said.
John: Is that why everyone’s smiling and nodding a lot, but there’s no flow to things?
Craig: Yes. It was horrible. We all did our best. Afterwards, we were just laughing. They’re like, “We kind of understood what you were saying.” I was like, “I kind of understood what you were saying, but I couldn’t ask any follow-ups, because I had no idea really what your answers were.”
John: Wow.
Craig: I did get to have a lovely moment with Danny Pudi where we recreated his wonderful viral moment where he told Larry King, “Larry, I’m on Duck Tales.” That was fun. People really seemed to enjoy it. The word from the crowd was that they enjoyed it.
John: Great.
Craig: We were happy about that. Then we all went to dinner and left. That’s what I saw of Comic Con, a backstage garbage area.
John: It was like Hunger Games, and you were just the noble family coming out there and seeing the Hunger Games but didn’t have to participate in any of the Hunger Games.
Craig: I did not participate in the Hunger Games. I know that there will be some sort of conventioneering in my future. That’s for sure. I would like for it to be a little bit more of an experience than I had there. That was very much a Seal Team Six, get in, get out kind of deal.
John: Love it. Next piece is news and follow-up. Craig, when you need to refer to someone’s credits, where do you look at their credits?
Craig: I go to IMDb.
John: I have been going to IMDb for 20 years. Actually, my very first answering your questions about screenwriting happened on IMDb. I used to host a little column weekly on IMDb. I believe IMDb is a great resource that should be treasured. At times, I’ve been frustrated with IMDb, because they’ll make changes to the layout. It’ll just be broken and stupid. I made an extension for Safari at one point that I called Less IMDb that made it prettier and made it work better. This is credits for John Logan, classic credits. Describe what you’re seeing here.
Craig: It says Filmography, and then just a list of blue linked credits, but the television series have sub-credits of episodes. That’s what it has.
John: This is what you’d expect to see. They give you the option now where you could see the preview of the next version of IMDb, what they’re going to be doing. It’s going to be huge improvements, right? This is how credits are going to be shown now. This is the same credits for the same writer. Tell me what you’re seeing.
Craig: Now I’m seeing mostly the one-sheets for those things in chunks, without much information. I guess it’s all the same information. It’s just more visual. I don’t know, it’s all weirdly laid out in a way that makes no sense to me, because it’s a grid.
John: It’s a two-column grid. You can’t tell order of things. Are you supposed to go left to right, or is it going down the bottom?
Craig: It looks like it’s going left to right, top to bottom, which is standard for say a meta-crossword but not necessarily the way our minds are trained to work for this.
John: No. I think it is disastrous, and it’s a really, really bad idea. I’m trying to publicly point this out and maybe shame them and get them to rethink what they’re doing here, or at least make it an option to get back to a normal list view, because this is disastrous. This makes life much harder when you’re like, “What has an actor been in? Oh my God, I don’t want to look at all the posters. I just want to see a list of their credits.”
Craig: Here’s a question for you, as a Webster. The information that IMDb includes is not proprietary. It’s all based on publicly available credits, obviously. Could one create a better IMDb, meaning the layout is better, and simply use a scraper to just start going through IMDb, pulling all the crap out of information, and then re-presenting it in a much nicer format?
John: That would be copyright violations out the wazoo.
Craig: Really?
John: Yeah, it is.
Craig: Why?
John: While it is public information, the accumulation of that and curation of that is a service that IMDb is actually providing. You would run into so many problems there.
Craig: Really?
John: Yeah, you really would.
Craig: If I go, “I want a program that goes over to IMDb and pulls out John August’s credits.”
John: Yep.
Craig: Your credits don’t belong to IMDb.
John: Absolutely true.
Craig: Why can’t I do that?
John: I believe that if I were creating a scraper that went to one person’s thing and scraped out all the stuff, that would not be problematic. If I went and created a bot that went and scraped all of IMDb, which is what you really want to do, that is problematic, because-
Craig: Really?
John: … not only am I taking their copyright information, I am-
Craig: What? What copyright information?
John: The organization of all their credits and the curation of those credits to make sure that they are accurate.
Craig: I don’t think that that’s copyrightable. I just think that they’re simply going through publicly available information and vetting it that it’s true. That doesn’t mean it’s… They didn’t write it.
John: I believe there are problems there. Actually, when I was a summer intern at Universal, my job was to enter stuff into Universal’s own equivalent thing to IMDb. It’s a giant, giant pain in the ass. We were literally looking through Variety and putting credits off of Variety.
Craig: The labor does not necessarily equate to copyright. I would say that this sounds like what we need is for one of our brilliant listeners, perhaps an attorney and/or a Webster-
John: Webster.
Craig: Or a Webster attorney.
John: Oh my God, can you imagine if Webster were an attorney?
Craig: Oh my God.
John: Webster, the little-
Craig: Please can we go back to 1987-
John: Emmanuel Lewis.
Craig: …and write the Webster attorney show?
John: Oh my God, so good.
Craig: Webster at law.
John: So good.
Craig: God, I’d watch that. It would be so good. Megana, do you have any idea who we’re talking about?
Megana Rao: No, I’m Googling Webster right now.
Craig: There we go. Emmanuel Lewis-
John: Emmanuel Lewis.
Craig: … is wonderful. Back in the day, there’s an actor named Gary Coleman, and he was the star of Different Strokes. People who are my age or John’s age just loved Gary Coleman. He was very short. He was short in fact because of a disease. He didn’t have dwarfism. He was just short. His growth was inhibited. While this made him wonderfully valuable for a television show about a cute kid, it became problematic for him as he grew up. Then of course, once he grew up, they need to find another Gary Coleman, and they landed on Emmanuel Lewis, who also was incredibly small, I think again because of a disorder. Emmanuel Lewis played Webster.
John: I don’t even really remember the full conceit of Webster. Was there a butler involved in the show somehow?
Craig: I don’t remember a butler. I just remember that they went as close to Different Strokes as they could, like, “We’re going to take a Black kid and put him with a white adoptive father, and then we’re going to do it again. In fact, change as little as we can possibly change.” You were able to do stuff like that. There was no Twitter, so people couldn’t destroy you within seconds. Oh, Webster. Let’s get Webster back.
John: Webster attorney comes in here and he figures out that you could actually scrape IMDb and put it in a better format. Maybe there’s some version of that that can happen. Honestly, you can also go to Wikipedia, which is genuinely a public service that has this stuff, but it’s just not as thorough and accurate as these other things are, and things don’t link through the same way that IMDb does. I want to make sure we don’t lose what is great about IMDb in this mad quest to make it prettier or make the trailers more accessible.
Craig: IMDb is Amazon’s bad advertising platform. That’s what it is. I think it’s a mess. I hate going on IMDb, by the way. I hate it. I can’t find anything. It used to be that you would put somebody’s name in and you would get everything. Now you have to look for all filmography or you just see the things that they want you to see. It’s a mess.
John: The plugin that we used to make for it, which we actually had to sunset it because it kept breaking because they kept making other changes to it, did make it better on desktop. It couldn’t help out on the web because it’s really an app now. The app isn’t as bad as the web version is, but still it’s frustrating.
Craig: That’s the other thing is if I’m looking at something on IMDb on my phone, it screams at me to use the app and takes up half a page, demanding that I use the app. Why? Why do they need me to use the app? Tell me, from an app guy point of view.
John: Because they built the app. Also, because they can hold you inside the ecosystem better and longer, they’ve discovered, if they are keeping you in the app. That’s why.
Craig: There we go.
John: There you go.
Craig: There we go.
John: Speaking of keeping people in the ecosystem-
Craig: Segue Man.
John: … let’s do some follow-up on Netflix. We’ve talked about Netflix and that they had disappointing earnings, and everyone was up in arms. Their earnings weren’t as disappointing as people expected, so they’re maybe not so screwed. This last week I read an article by Dave Karpf on his Substack talking about re-framing what we should think about with Netflix. I thought it was really helpful, so I wanted to put a link in the show notes to this.
What Karpf is arguing is that we started to think about Netflix as two different businesses. There’s this actual business, which is a subscription video service, and it’s the imaginary business, where it’s a competitor to Apple and Amazon and one of these giant things. What he points out is that Amazon can sell you more and more stuff every month. There’s no ceiling to how much they can sell you. Same with Apple. They can sell you new products. Facebook and Google can sell more ads off of you. Netflix can make about $120 a year off of you, and that’s it. There’s a cap to how much Netflix can make per person. That’s the reality. Netflix may want to say that they’re competing against video games and other things for your attention, but really, they just need you to not cancel the service. When it comes down to that, Netflix will be fine.
Craig: Netflix has a pretty obvious challenge. They became what they are, because they were the streaming service. Now they’re many streaming services. It’s not merely that they are competing with the other streaming services. It’s that the other streaming services took the stuff that Netflix was using to make itself into Netflix. That is to say the library of everything. Very famously, Netflix ran all the episodes of Friends, and people would become obsessed and subscrobe. Subscrobe?
John: They subscrobe.
Craig: That ought to be a word. They subscrobe.
John: It totally could be a word.
Craig: They subscrobe to Netflix.
John: We’ll look it up on Google Ngram Viewer, and it’ll show that subscrobe began rising in late 2022.
Craig: They subscrobe, and then of course, Warner Bros pulled Friends away, because HBO Max now has Friends. What does Netflix do? They spend an insane amount of money to essentially invent a library out of thin air. Some of that library is wonderful. I think like anything, lots of it may be preferably not so wonderful.
John: Any of these streamers would kill to have a Stranger Things, to have-
Craig: They do.
John: … Squid Game.
Craig: They do. That’s the thing. They all have something that people love. The trick is they also have passive income from these massive libraries that generate money over time and have so for hundreds of years. No, a hundred years. The biggest issue I think that Netflix is struggling with is they only do one thing. It doesn’t matter if Amazon takes on some water in a particular quarter over Amazon Prime. They’re also selling everything to everyone. They also are hosting 50% of all the world’s websites and etc, etc. HBO Max is part of a larger empire that includes Warner Bros and all sorts of other things. Similarly, Disney Plus is part of a corporation-
John: It’s part of Disney.
Craig: … that has hotels and cruise ships. Basically, everybody has a network, a publishing business, cruise ships, theme parks, all this stuff that has been built over decades, and Netflix doesn’t. If there’s a downswing in streaming, Netflix will suffer disproportionately. That’s just how it goes. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I have no clue, other than to say that I think that Netflix is either going to have to charge more or spend less or both. From my simple layman point of view, I don’t quite understand how they’re supposed to do stuff otherwise.
John: They’re already going to be spending less. They’ve already announced that they’re going to be spending less.
Craig: There you go.
John: Or they’re going to be spending differently. They’re spending probably more on local productions, which probably makes sense for them, because it helps them grow in markets that they want to grow in.
Craig: You mean local to different areas like-
John: Sorry, so local to India, local to-
Craig: India. Local to Korea. Local to, got it.
John: Great. That’s really good for those markets. They are going to have an advertising-supported tier. I don’t get that. I don’t think that necessarily makes sense. They will also probably raise rates at some point. They’ll also crack down on password sharing. I think my takeaway from this is, listen, they’re probably not going to be the giant juggernaut that they were, but they’re also going to be fine. They’re not going to go away tomorrow.
Craig: No, I don’t think they’re going to go away tomorrow, but I do think that at some point Netflix does become a very tasty target for acquisition, only because, look, they have so many people that have subscrobe over time. The issue is, if they are struggling to keep their business model going without a massive and beloved library, but they have this terrific brand presence and loads of subscribers who subscrobe, if I were a streaming service that maybe wanted some of that, I would just snatch it up. Easy to say snatch up Netflix. This is a company that’s worth so much money. It’s worth billions of dollars, as in $50 billion less than it was worth a half a year ago, I think, which is incredible.
John: I think that really gets down to the distinction between what its actual business was and what its imaginary business was.
Craig: There you go.
John: That’s why it was valued, like an Apple or Amazon. That was probably unrealistic. It was unrealistic.
Craig: That is the one area where I never understood, people’s belief in Netflix’s imaginary business. I just never understood it. I read this article. I think it’s really good. I think it comes down to a very simple thing. For all the glitter and smoke, Netflix needs people to subscribe and keep subscribing. That’s it. Simple as that. Nothing else matters. They’re losing subscribers. After last week’s… Let’s see. We had a Q2 earnings report. Netflix was predicted to lose 2 million subscribers, but it only lost 1 million subscribers. That’s still a lot, where everybody else is picking up subscribers. If your big victory is you only lost 1 million, that’s not good. A million subscribers, that’s a lot of people. Jeez, Louise.
John: The other point Megana and I were discussing is that their strategy of all at once releasing and binge releases, that fundamentally does not make sense in a world where you want to keep people subscribing to your service.
Craig: I can only talk about it from a creative point of view. Of course, like anyone, I have binged shows. Of course I have. From a creative point of view, as somebody that makes a show, I would be so bummed out to just dump. They can say binge or whatever. I call it dumping. Just dump the whole thing there. I think also from a creative point of view, a lot of people have started talking about the tyranny of this algorithm and a sense that it’s all a bit synthetic over there. This season of Barry had a great condemnation of the algorithm and the way the algorithm runs things. It’s a bit terrifying.
I’ve talked to other showrunners and writers whose shows have been canceled. Netflix really won’t tell them why, because also Netflix doesn’t show you any numbers. They’ll just show you matrix readouts of little green digits that don’t make any sense. They will show you bar graphs where your viewership is compared to other people’s viewership, but they won’t show you what the other bar graphs represent, which is awesome. I would love to do that. I just would put that on a placard. “You’re this little thing, and these other things are larger bars. What are those bars? Stuff. Anyway, you’re fired.” I don’t know. It’s amazing.
John: I think the real takeaway here is that Netflix is basically the Scriptnotes podcast, the Scriptnotes Premium feed. Just like the Premium feed, we only get money when people continue to subscribe to the Premium feed. We try to keep our churn down. The difference is, while they’ve lost a million subscribers, we grew subscribers month to month, year to year.
Craig: If we lose a million subscribers, I have a huge problem.
John: We’re in real trouble.
Craig: You’re in real trouble, because that means we had a million subscribers. Then we’d really have to talk. John, it’s so weird, over last few years you’ve bought seven houses.
John: It is crazy what that-
Craig: What’s that about?
John: Residuals. Residuals, man.
Craig: It’s residuals.
John: You write a Charlie’s Angels, those residuals keep coming.
Craig: Look, I want to say to all of the people who do listen to us who work at Netflix or people who write for Netflix, I’m not Netflix-bashing.
John: Not at all.
Craig: I want as many healthy employers as possible. Netflix is this 800-pound gorilla. It did essentially invent the modern streaming business. I want it to succeed. I want there to be as many healthy employers as possible. I do think that Netflix has engaged in some not so wonderful practices that have had a deleterious effect on the way writing is done and the way product is made. I certainly don’t want them to die. Hopefully, they can figure this out, right the ship, and perhaps get us back to the practice of encouraging good shows. Taking some risks would be nice, and paying writers more, in a more transparent way, because Netflix also invented the “we’re not telling you how many people watch your show” method.
John: Agreed. Let’s talk about making those shows. Our main topic here came from Matt Byrne, who’s one of my former assistants, who actually is working on a Netflix show for Shondaland.
Craig: Great.
John: It all fits together nicely. Megana, could you read us Matt’s question?
Megana: Matt says, “I’d love an episode on understanding and approaching special/visual effects. I feel like it would be empowering to understand the menu and cost of everything, from adding leaves to treats to change seasons to creating massive scale space battles, empowering both from the earliest stages of writing, knowing what scale you might be able to achieve appropriate to the project, and also when it comes to fighting for or adjusting scenes during all stages of production.”
Craig: Such a good question.
John: Such a good question from such a good writer. Craig, you’ve gone through this a lot I’m sure on your show. Even just in times when you’ve been Zooming, I can see in the background of your shot, oh, that is clearly visual effects things you’re talking about. That is a prop that you’re having to figure out is that entirely digital. Talk to us about, on your show… Maybe start back to as you were starting to write your script for things. How much were you thinking about visual effects? How much did that visual effects thinking change over the course of actually shooting your show?
Craig: You have to think about it constantly. There are certain things that as writers we are free to ignore. We’re free to ignore budget and any of that stuff. It’s probably best that we don’t. We have a general sense that if I say, “Look, I want to shoot this show on a real boat on the water, and I want the boat to be on fire for real, and I want this and this to happen,” you understand this is going to cost a lot of money. It’s going to take a lot of time. It’s going to be difficult. Similarly, we should have a general sense of how visual effects work will impact our budget and the work that’s done.
You’re constantly asking your visual effects supervisor, is this better than doing it practically, meaning for real, or not? By better, we mean will it look better and will it cost less. Those are the big variables, look better, cost less. Sometimes it will look better and cost more. Then you have to make a choice. If they say this will not look good, it will cost a lot but it won’t look good, that’s also something you need to know. When you’re designing sequences, particularly large ones where you know you’re going to be doing world building or putting characters in a position where you’re not simply able to create it, you need to then talk to that person about where there are these landmines that you the layperson might not be aware of. Little things can suddenly jack up the price and make shots very, very complicated.
By and large, if characters are moving in front of something, and whatever that thing is needs to be a visual effect, even if it’s just a building or a sky that looks different, you want them in front of a blue screen, because that helps the visual effects department essentially have nothing but those people. Then they can put other stuff in. If you don’t, now they’ve got Roto, which means going through frame by frame and cutting them out. The expense goes way up. You’re always looking to avoid Roto-ing, if you can.
You are also, as much as possible, encouraged to have real elements from which to build visual effects around. If you’re lighting something on fire, if you have a building that’s burning, you want some real fire. You want to work with the special effects department to create practical fire, even if it’s not engulfing a building, because that would be unsafe, but some controllable fire that gives the visual effects department something to work with like natural light and sourcing. It gives the cinematographer a chance to work with real light as opposed to imagining what digital light would be doing.
All of these questions will inform what you do. At some point you must be ready for people to come to you and say, “We can’t, for the budget we have or the time we have,” or you get to choose this or this. Then you need to make your choices. You can’t get caught in the game of turning into an accountant for your own show. You don’t want to be the guy that just wins the victory for saving the most money. No one cares in the audience. On the other hand, you can’t be someone who doesn’t give a damn, because in the end, you’ll only hurt yourself.
John: I was talking with a showrunner this past week about a project she’s working on. She was talking about how even in the writers’ room she will sometimes be nixing ideas, just saying clearly on a budget level, on a visual effects level, that is going to be an idea that is going to kill us. It’s going to take away too many other options we need to have for the show. Those are hard things to do. It’s only with some experience, having made other things, she could see, okay, that is going to be problematic. I know that it’s going to be too expensive for the value we’re going to get out of it. I want to be able to save money to do this other big thing that is going to be better for the show. Those are tough calls to make. She has some experience, but it’s tougher if you’re a brand new writer who’s never been through that kind of production experience.
Craig: It is. You need to constantly ask questions. It’s probably better to check before you kill something, because there are times where between the art department, which is responsible for building the real sets, and the visual effects department, which was responsible for building things that aren’t there in reality, a solution may occur. Very important to us that we did a shot in Chernobyl where we see this power plant worker emerging from the exploded building to see that he’s actually outside. The roof is gone, and we can see that we’re exposed. He’s walking in front of this stuff. The production department built this environment up to a line. The line was basically where we would see someone moving. The person would never move above that line. Everything above that line gets replaced. At that point, you don’t need a blue screen above there. They can just digitally wipe it out and replace it, because nothing’s moving in front of it.
That concept of set extension is fundamental now to writing. If you can, in your mind, start thinking about creating these large places that don’t exist, but stage the scene in such a way that your real characters are moving in front of real things up to a point, and then the rest is set extension, that may be cost-effective. That may be more doable than you think.
John: The other classic thing you’d see in addition to set extension is when doors are opened, the space beyond that door. You’re on a stage, and so therefore the door is not looking outdoors. You’re putting a green screen, a blue screen behind there to replace that background, the window behind that door, so that the interior stage set actually feels like it’s the real exterior location.
Craig: We do that always.
John: That’s fundamental. Let’s talk about these from the very start decisions about where this show is going to be set, because visual effects is also going to determine what locations you’re going to be picking or even where you’re going to base your show. You based it out of Calgary, presumably because it gave you enough real visual stuff, the things you needed for your show, but you went in knowing that there’s going to be times where we’re going to have to replace backgrounds. We’re going to have to put trees where there aren’t trees. We’re going to have to put mountains where there aren’t mountains. How early on in the conversation or even as you were writing were you thinking about, okay, given what I’m going to have in Calgary, what other choice am I making on the page?
Craig: We were pretty far in on the writing before we landed on shooting in Alberta. Alberta wasn’t informed primarily by the writing. I think it’s good to start with dream. Let’s go ahead and dream our story. Then someone can say, “Look, here’s are the environments we have where we basically get free visual effects.” The Canadian Rockies is free visual effects. They’re amazing. These beautiful landscapes, they’re very… This is where they shot The Revenant. It’s gorgeous. That stuff is incredibly valuable, especially in stretches of your story where you know you’re going to be out there in the wilderness. Now you have wilderness. Where you think, “I’m going to need to create a bombed-out post-apocalyptic city,” those don’t exist. Then it’s simply about finding some locations that you feel gives your characters enough to be standing on and moving through, dressing that around them, and then talking about how the set extensions work from there.
You’re absolutely right. You need to be talking about that from the beginning, because there are things that are easier than other things. As writers, we don’t always know. I can’t tell you how many times I will walk over to our visual effects supervisor, who has been with us since prep, through shooting, and now here in post-production, to say, “Hey, difficult or hard to do this?” Difficult means time and money. He’ll say, “No, that’s easy.” Sometimes he’s like, “That’s actually harder than you would think.” There are times where I’m like, “I did not anticipate that.” You just don’t know. I will tell you that when you’re shooting, so many people who are invested in keeping the day moving will say to you, “We can fix that with visual effects.” They can do that. They can erase that. They can do this. They can do that. Then I’ll turn to our supervisor and say, “I’m being told that that’s easy.” He’ll go, “Ah… ” I’m like, “Okay, it’s not. Let’s fix it now.” Try and fix as much as you can now.
I think we should have a visual effects supervisor come on our show, and we should talk through the fundamentals of how visual effects are done, not the exciting stuff like spaceships blowing up, which is actually easy, but the really boring stuff, the stuff that basically you don’t know is happening, the invisible stuff. That’s really important for us as writers to know about.
John: On a show like yours, is the visual effects supervisor the person who’s also deciding, “We’re going to do a practical and we’re going to supplement it,” or is there a second… Who is responsible for getting the people together to talk over where this is going to split? Is it the director? Is it the line producer? Who’s involved with that conversation?
Craig: Everyone. The director, the showrunner of course, the physical producer, the visual effects supervisor, the visual effects producer, who’s handling the budgeting for all that and then the bidding, and the art department. Very important that the art department, the production designer is working hand in hand with the visual effects people, because that’s where digital and reality meet, and trying to figure out where the line is and what the best way of skinning the particular cat is. Everybody comes together and agrees we want to do this thing, but there are times…
Early on, there was a sequence that Neil and I were talking about, and it just became outrageously expensive to do and wasn’t necessarily… The part that was expensive wasn’t the part that we loved. Those are great targets for re-conceiving. Just do it in a different way, because we’re not going to get massive amounts of love and adoration for the fact that, I don’t know, whatever it is is happening in the background. It’s not important. It comes down to creative judgments. The creative judgments are set against the backdrop of what things will cost and how hard they’re going to be, just like everything else that we do. Knowing your options, crucial.
John: Let’s move on to our second topic. This is a listener question. Megana, can you set us up?
Megana: Travis wrote in and asked about optioning a novel. He says, “The novel is an old bestseller from a well-known writer, but one of their minor works. After weeks of back and forth with the author’s publisher, then being forwarded to their agent, I’ve learned that the rights are available. However, in my last email from the agent, they simply said, ‘We’ll look forward to hearing more about your interest.’ Now I’m feeling a bit naïve. I just assumed they would give me their terms and I could take it or leave it. Do they want me to present an offer? It is extremely amateur for me to ask if they have a standard agreement or what their asking terms would be for an option? Should I contact an entertainment attorney and get them to draft a proposal? To further complicate things, I’m currently in the process of signing with a manager. Should I wait until that is finalized and get the management team on board for the option?”
Craig: Why would you ever talk to an attorney about something as complicated as this?
John: As optioning. Craig, have you ever optioned a book?
Craig: No.
John: I have optioned one book. It was a good experience. Ken Richman, my attorney, ended up doing the option agreement. The short version of it is I read this book, I loved it, I reached out to the author. No one else was chasing the rights at this point. I said, “Hey, could I option this? I’m not sure I can get this set up, but I think I would love to try.” He said, “Sure.” It was a very low-cost option, a couple thousand dollars for 18 months or beyond. I never ended up doing anything with it. I let the option lapse. Still friendly with the author. It was my first time optioning a thing. I’m not sure I should’ve optioned it. I want to talk about what options are, but also what options are for somebody like Travis.
Craig: First let’s just say we’ve talked about options before, which is essentially you control the ability to make a movie or to essentially turn one thing into another, adapt the work into another work. You control that for a certain amount of time. Nobody else can turn that novel into something.
John: It gives you the option to buy out the rights to something. Rather than paying the full purchase price, you’re getting a hold on those rights for a period of time.
Craig: Exactly.
John: Eighteen months is common, but it could be a different amount of time.
Craig: I’m going to give you $500 for the right to buy your car within the next 6 months. If I don’t buy the car within the next 6 months, you’ve made $500.
John: The right to buy the car for a specific price.
Craig: That’s right.
John: That’s really crucial too.
Craig: Exactly. I’m going to give you 500 now. Within the next 6 months, if I give you 5,000, then your 1999 Toyota Tercel is mine. By the way, do not spend that much money on a ’99 Tercel.
John: Although in this car market these days, it’s all crazy.
Craig: I will say, Travis, you’ve answered your own question. First of all, certainly when they say, “We’ll look forward to hearing more about your interest,” what they’re saying is, “What are you talking about here, buddy? How much money you want to give us?” Why would they give you a term. Oh, no no no no no. No no no no no no no. You tell me. What do you want? You called me. How bad do you want this thing? That’s what they’re wondering is… If you are super interested in this and you have a lot of money, you take the first shot.
What that means, of course, is that you’re already outclassed, because that’s a business, and you’re not. Yes, you need an attorney now. Anything you say at this point they could turn into a warrant of something important. You’re not warranting anything. You’re just trying to find out what this costs. You need an attorney to do all your talking for you. Ideally, that attorney would have a decent sense of what these things generally option for based on market comps. Your manager may also have a sense of that. I don’t think you need to wait for a manager necessarily. I also don’t think that you need to option this at all.
John: I don’t think you do either. Let’s talk through a little bit more options and then get into why Travis probably shouldn’t be optioning this. Whenever you’re setting up an option, what your attorney will be looking to do is set up what are the terms of the option agreement, how long does it go, is it renewable, which is crucial, can you keep renewing it at the same price, keep that option going, what the price is for the option, it could be a dollar classically or it could be a lot more than that, what the final purchase price will be. That might be contingent on what the budget for the actual movie or TV show is. Three percent is common, but it could be a big range. I think the one I optioned, it was 3% of the budget. What rights are you optioning? Is it just the film rights? Is it the TV rights? Is it stage rights? Is it everything? You’ve got to be specific about that.
This is also crucial, as someone who’s had books where people tried to option. Does the author have any controls? Does the author control anything over casting or director approval or script approval? Those are things that are going to be in this first option agreement. That’s why you’d have an attorney do this, if you were to try to option this book, which I think we’re both saying you probably shouldn’t.
Craig: I don’t see what the great value is here. It doesn’t sound like it’s something that a lot of people are chasing. If you write a script that other people are interested in purchasing, if it’s a studio, and you say, “Look, it’s based on this novel, and the rights are available,” then the studio will be like, “Oh, okay, we’ll just go get those,” because they’re going to have to get them from you anyway. You wouldn’t lose any leverage, because they’d still want your script.
John: Two choices Travis has here. He could go back to them and say, “Fantastic to hear. As I sit down with other producers, I’d like to bring this up as a thing I really would very much want to write.” That is an indication, “Hey, don’t be shopping this to other people.” As I go in and have my general meetings at places, there’s always this thing like, “Hey, what do you want to write? What are you interested in?” I can say, “There’s this book that I really love. I’ve talked to the author, and the rights are available. Here’s how I’d do it.” You get someone else to buy the rights for you. That’s a possibility. Could they swoop in? We’ve had other listeners on the show who have said, “I mentioned this book, and someone else bought it and scooped it out from under me.” Could that happen to Travis?
Craig: Yeah, it could.
John: Yeah, it could. It could. Absolutely.
Craig: It could, but I don’t think that… Let’s say you option this thing for a standard term, which is about a year and a half. It’s pretty typical. If you don’t sell this within a year and a half, and somebody else wants to do it, then they’ll just sell it to that other person. The odds of you going from no script to something in a year and a half is not strong.
John: Travis could also decide to write this script based on this book without controlling the underlying rights. That’s risky, but it does happen. That script will at least be a writing sample for Travis that he can show out on the town if he doesn’t control the underlying book. Maybe it turns out great, and somebody wants to buy the script and the book. They can do it. It just becomes a much harder thing to set up and sell that way, just because the rights holder is going to say, “Great. You bought that script, and you want the rights to this book? Great, now they cost $5 million.” They can hold things hostage.
Craig: I agree. I think you probably don’t need to get this deep into it. First start writing and see if you even want to do it. That’s the other thing. You haven’t written anything yet, so who even knows?
John: We have a follow-up question here from Hannah that I think ties in well.
Megana: Hannah from Minneapolis asks, “For loose adaptations like 10 Things I Hate About You and Taming of the Shrew or Clueless and Emma, do you need to obtain rights for the source material? I’m thinking no exact lines or character names, but modernized versions of the characters and plot. The book I have in mind was written in 1920 and is not in the public domain.”
Craig: Hold on. She switcheroo’ed us there.
John: She did.
Craig: You started with a thing that was in the public domain, a thing that was in the public domain, a thing that was in the public domain. If it’s in the public domain, you don’t have to worry about it. If it’s written in 1920 and it’s not in the public domain, then you do.
John: It could be simpler. To say loose adaptations, strict adaptations, for things in public domain, you could do a very direct adaptation. You don’t have to worry about any of that stuff. Just do what you want to do. If it’s in the public domain, it’s in the public domain. It is free for you to use. This book that she’s thinking about that was written in 1920, that’s not in the public domain, it’s going to be in the public domain really soon. It’s not going to be forever before it becomes public domain. If it’s not public domain now and you want to be working on it, I’d think about what is it about that book that is appealing to you and is there a way you can do something that is like that but is not directly based on it, because you probably can. Just don’t take it directly.
Craig: No exact lines or character names is not necessarily going to save you from copyright infringement. The question that will be asked is would the people who do control the rights to that book, I assume an estate, would they recognize in your work that you have adapted their work? One of the rights that copyright infers is a right to make derivative works, including adaptations. If it’s recognizable as an adaptation, you got a problem, because clearly you’re pulling more than just an idea. If it’s not recognizable as an adaptation, then I guess the question is really are you adapting the book at all.
I think John’s making an excellent point. The book was written in 1920. Odds are, unless the book was written by a seven-year-old, that this is going to be in public domain soon enough, because public domain essentially is conferred by a particular period of time after the death of the author. I don’t know which book it is. Generally speaking, when you’re getting back into 1920, you’re talking about 100 years ago, see how you do.
John: The F. Scott Fitzgerald books are becoming public domain now.
Craig: Agatha Christie books are going to start going to the public domain. There’s already the very first one. I think a few more will be following.
John: This is also the point in the podcast where we remind people that our copyright laws and our extensions of copyright laws are bullshit. Things should be public domain much sooner than they currently are.
Craig: They are constantly changing. Basically, every time Mickey Mouse approaches public domain status, the copyright in the United States seems to get extended again.
John: Kick that can. Maybe we’ll just let Mickey Mouse just have eternal copyright and let everything else go. I don’t care about Mickey Mouse. Fine.
Craig: I don’t care either. I don’t even think Disney cares. At this point they’re like, “Whatever. Whatever.”
John: We have one short question here on shorts. Megana, do you want to take this one?
Megana: Leah wrote in and said, “I’m a filmmaker who lives and works in Los Angeles. I’ve been fortunate enough to find a financier to fund a few short films of mine. I love making short films. They’re fun, rewarding, and meaningful. Most importantly, my cast and crew are paid decently. I’m using short films as a way to hone my skills as writer/director/editor and as a calling card for features. When I get more established in the feature and TV world, I don’t ever see myself not doing short films. I’m astounded by how many directors and writers who have, quote, ‘made it’ don’t make short films. At a certain point, is filmmaking a job instead of art? Is asking a director or writer to do a short film the equivalent of asking an off-duty dishwasher to do the dishes? In essence, why am I not seeing more short films from P.T. Anderson, Greta Gerwig, or Debra Granik?
Craig: Because they don’t want to do them. Just a wild guess.
John: My first instinct is because they don’t have to make them, so they’re not making them. Then I think about maybe it’s just no one’s asking them to make them. When I think of filmmakers who actually do shorts, they’re usually for a purpose, like New Yorkers asking Wes Anderson to make a short film about something.
Craig: An ad, usually.
John: Basically an ad. That’s the thing is advertising videos, other stuff like that become the equivalent of short films. That’s why big directors will do those rather than do a narrative short film that is just a reason to make it. I think it’s because, at least in the US, there’s not really a market for short films, there’s not really a purpose for short films, other than as calling cards. Once someone has made it, they don’t feel the urgent need to make a calling card.
Craig: Ultimately, when filmmakers make films, they are looking for an audience. There isn’t a tremendous audience, at least in the US, for short films. People don’t necessarily seek them out. It may be fun, rewarding, and meaningful to you, the filmmaker, Leah, but they don’t seem to be fun, rewarding, and meaningful to most of the audience. It’s just a fact. People just don’t go seeking them out. They don’t love them. They tend to like episodes of television which are… Certainly half-hours are like many short films. Or they like full features. That’s what they prefer. That is also how most of us were raised culturally. That’s how most of us think, including P.T. Anderson, Greta Gerwig, and Debra Granik. I think your premise is that everybody loves them, so why aren’t we making more of them, and I dispute your premise. I think you do, which is wonderful.
John: That’s great.
Craig: I think you should keep doing it. That’s fantastic. When you say, “I’m astounded by how many directors and writers who have, quote, ‘made it’ don’t do short films,” you mean like almost all of us? At that point you should not be astounded. At that point you should just think, “I’m into something that’s sort of niche,” because that’s what it is. John and I don’t do short films. Also, a lot of writers don’t write in that format. If you’re a non-writing director, there’s also just a lot less material out there for you.
John: Craig, I’ve done two short films.
Craig: What?
John: I’m actually really proud of both of them.
Craig: Which ones?
John: I did God, which was my initial thing with Melissa McCarthy.
Craig: I thought that was The Nines.
John: No. God is the short film I did before Go, with Melissa McCarthy.
Craig: Pre-Go.
John: That set up Melissa McCarthy. Incredibly helpful for me. It was a calling card, really useful for that.
Craig: Was that when you were in school?
John: We’d shot Go. It hadn’t come out yet. I used the short ends of film left over from Go to shoot the short film with Melissa McCarthy, who was delightful.
Craig: It was called God?
John: It’s called God. You’ve never seen God?
Craig: I love the fact that you made Go, and then you were like, “I have some extra film and the letter D.”
John: “I will add it on there.” Craig, after this, literally, you have to watch it, because I think you’ll find it delightful.
Craig: I will.
John: It’s literally the first time you’re going to see Melissa McCarthy on film.
Craig: God.
John: God.
Craig: God, writing it down.
John: You will understand me better after watching this short film. I made a short film during the 2008 writers’ strike, which was a premise pilot for a series we never ended up shooting. It’s a short film, but it’s also a pilot.
Craig: It’s a pilot.
John: It’s a pilot. It’s a web series pilot. I’m also reminded, back on Episode 287, my One Cool Thing was this short film called Vale done by Alejandro Amenabar. I thought, “Wow, I don’t understand why this short film exists with Dakota Johnson, but it’s just absolutely delightful.” Then a listener pointed out, “No, it’s actually an ad for the beer they’re drinking in the short film.”
Craig: Bingo. There’s been quite a few of those. Martin Scorsese has made one. Every now and then BMW will hire some wonderful filmmaker to make a 20-minute thing. Anyway, point being, Leah, keep doing what you love. That’s important.
John: 100%.
Craig: The fact that you’ve been able to find financing for it is wonderful. I’m hoping that there is, even if it’s not a massive audience, it is a dedicated audience to your films, but I don’t think your premise that other people are somehow missing out on something wonderful is correct. If you love that, you do it. If other filmmakers don’t, they do what they do.
John: Exactly. It has come time for our One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things. First off, for screenwriters, if you listen to this podcast and enjoy people talking about screenwriting, you’ll probably enjoy Jonathan Stokes’s little video series called Raising the Stakes, where he talks about stakes in movies. The series of videos is about different themes on stakes in screenwriting things. Take a look at them. They’re delightful. They’re on YouTube. If you’re a person who plays video games, which is a lot of people who listen to the podcast, you might enjoy Stray. Have you heard of Stray?
Craig: I have.
John: I’ve been playing it. I think it’s just delightful. In it, you are a stray cat who is wandering through this post-apocalyptic, empty city. You’re just a cat. You can do cat things. You can’t talk, can’t do anything else. You can scratch against trees. It does a really good job with the controller and using the rumble in the controller and also the speaker, to really make it feel like you’re doing the things that you’re doing, which I was impressed by. I just really like it. I also like that the cat cannot miss jumps. If it looks like you can jump on it, you can jump on it. If you fall, it’s because there’s a narrative reason why you’re supposed to fall. Cats are really good at jumping and landing. It just has perfect jumping.
Craig: I’ve been looking at that one. I think I might grab that myself. I’ve been playing Cyberpunk 2077, a game that I purchased when it came out, played for about one day, and went, “WTF this POS.”
John: So broken?
Craig: It was so broken. The very first quest line just wouldn’t function for me. I was like, “I guess I’m stuck.” A guy I follow on Twitter named Hutch, who’s a big professional gamer, was mentioning that he’s been playing it lately and that it’s way better than he thought it was based on all that, the disastrous launch. I was like, “All right, Hutch, I’ll go back in.” I’m playing it on a PS5. It is fixed. There’s been a few glitches. I’m not going to lie. There’s been a few moments where I’m like, “Oh, come on,” and yet still it’s been a lot of fun. I’m about halfway through the main line. It’s a lot of fun. Tip of the hat.
John: Great.
Craig: It started so poorly for me way back when, but I’m enjoying Cyberpunk now. That’s not my One Cool Thing. My One Cool Thing was actually sent to us on Twitter by a guy named Daniel Green, @dgreenmusic. It’s not a new thing. It’s an older video from 2017, which seems like it was yesterday but in fact was five years ago. It is a video called How to Make a Blockbuster Movie Trailer. It’s fantastic.
John: It’s really good. I think we have discussed it. I think it’s worth a rewatch because it’s really, really good.
Craig: It’s so good. It just nails every single moment. Why I think it’s important to actually watch this thing is to see behind the curtain and realize how easy it is to manipulate us and also how strange it is that we don’t immediately notice how repetitive and imitative these trailers are to each other.
John: I think it’s terrific. By the way, Craig, you know Dan Green, because Dan Green was your accompanist at the New York live show.
Craig: Oh, that Dan Green.
John: That’s Dan Green.
Craig: He’s wonderful. Thank you, Dan Green. Thank you for being my accompanist when I sang on Broadway. That’s a very, very stretchy fact. I was on a Broadway stage, not in a Broadway musical. I did sing. Dan was my accompanist. He’s wonderful. I remember he had just gotten married, I think.
John: He’s still happily married.
Craig: Fantastic.
John: They have a kid.
Craig: Wonderful.
John: He’s running some half-marathons. We’re proud of Dan. Love it.
Craig: Thank you very much for sending that in, Dan. That’s great.
John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Craig: You know it.
John: Our outro this week is by Adam Pineless. 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. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and they’re terrific. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all of the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on nightmares. Craig, Megana, thank you for a fun show.
Craig: Thank you.
Megana: Thank you.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Craig, do you suffer from nightmares?
Craig: Suffer is a strong word, but I certainly have them.
John: You encounter them. Megana, are you a nightmare person?
Megana: Oh yeah.
John: Are you a nightmare person.
Craig: Megana is such a nightmare person.
John: A nightmare person.
Megana: On all levels, I’m a nightmare person.
John: Megana, I’m guessing you do have nightmares, because you are the most easily startled person I’ve ever met in my life. I think they’re probably related.
Craig: Megana is really easily startled.
Megana: Yeah, I am. It happens in my sleep too.
John: Not good. Are there circumstances that you can trace back to, “Oh, I’m having nightmares because of X, Y, or Z,” or is it just random for you?
Craig: Why do I feel like this is definitely a robot trying to learn about human behavior? “Tell me about these nightmares.”
John: “Tell me about feelings.”
Craig: “How do they function?”
Megana: I think that’s what’s so unsettling about it is that they just come out of nowhere. Sometimes I’ll be feeling really good about things, and then I’ll have this horrible nightmare. Sometimes I have really realistic where I’m having conversations with people that go terribly, and then I wake up and I’m so mad and upset at them. It was a total lie. Do you guys experience that?
John: I absolutely do. I’m a very vivid dreamer. I feel like probably my time in dreams is much longer than my time awake. I feel like I have whole other lifetimes in dreams, in an Inception way. Luckily, very rarely do dreams because actually scary nightmare situations. They can be annoying dreams, but I rarely get things where I’m scared for my life.
Craig: As life goes on, I feel like I either have fewer nightmares, or when I have them, I have a general sense of… It’s not that I’m fully aware that I’m dreaming, but I know it’s not real, whereas when I was a kid I would have nightmares all the time. They were very vivid. I believed them. They were terrifying. I would even have repeat nightmares where it was the same one. As I was in it, I knew that the bad thing was going to happen. Happy that I’m out of that. I think in part it’s a function of a vivid imagination and a mind that has just creative… I think creative minds come up with really interesting and terrifying nightmares.
John: I’m always surprised in dreams how complicated and how thought out they are. Sometimes they feel plotted in a way. Dreaming is your brain doing its maintenance cycle. It’s cleaning out all this stuff. It’s rewiring things so that you’re trying to create logic that isn’t necessarily going to be there. I am struck when it does feel like it has a story and a plot and things are moving forward in ways that would happen in real life.
Craig: Megana, are your dreams incredibly thorough and complicated?
Megana: Yeah. Then sometimes I’m like, “Damn, I just wrote a movie in my head.” Then I try to write it out, and I’m like, “Oh, this is garbage.”
Craig: Garbage. It’s another garbage movie from a nightmare person.
John: Getting back to scary things happening at night, have either of you had sleep paralysis, where you wake up but you cannot move?
Craig: I have not.
John: I’ve had it.
Megana: I have had it a couple of times.
John: My experience was it was the absolute scariest thing, much scarier than a scary dream, because it will generally happen if I take a nap, because I’m not generally a napper. I kind of wake up, but I don’t fully wake up. Then I cannot move any part of my body. I’m aware of some dark force is usually just beyond where my feet would be. I can sometimes see the thing. I could feel it. I cannot move. I cannot speak. Eventually, I’ll be able to get some sort of gurgling scream out and Mike will wake me up.
Craig: Gurgling scream.
John: It really does feel like you’re just trying to force the thing out and you cannot do it.
Craig: Wow. You’re lucky you’re not married to me, because I would just watch you. I would see gurgly screams, and I would just be like, “Interesting.” Like Christopher Guest in Princess Bride. “Fascinating.”
John: Recording starting on a phone, videotaping the whole thing.
Craig: “You seem to be caught in a nightmare.”
John: Megana, was your experience of sleep paralysis at all the same?
Megana: Yes, that feeling of trying so hard to scream or to move, and then also just the feeling that there was someone else in the room that I couldn’t see, but they were just right out of the corner of my eye, and I’m trying to look for them.
Craig: That’s me.
Megana: Just recording us screaming.
Craig: That’s me watching.
John: What I’ve read, and I think last time it happened it was successful, is the only way out of it is you have to relax out of it, and eventually you will fall back asleep and your body will come back out of it. It’s really tough to chill out when you feel like that.
Craig: I had a nightmare last week. I will spare you the details, because as we all know, nothing’s more boring than hearing somebody describe their dream. There was one moment that encapsulated my fear. It was a dream where I was driving, and it turned into a car crash. I was driving, for whatever reason, I understood that I was, A, drunk, B, driving backwards, and C, the car was turning towards the right, but my eyes could only look to the left. I understood I was going to crash at some point, but I didn’t know when that point was. That was the scariest thing of all, just not knowing. Then the crash happened. I was fine. I woke up. It was no big deal.
John: A common thing for me is that I do wake up right before the actual injury would happen. I never feel the actual impact of it. I wake up in that, so I’m not feeling the actual pain.
Craig: This whole dream thing, it’s really weird, the concept of it. It’s bizarre. Just our bad brains barfing out neural crap.
John: As I look at my dog sleeping here, he has dreams too.
Craig: Of course.
John: I see him chasing and barking.
Craig: So cute. Little twitches.
Megana: I also had a question for you guys, because I had had a nightmare, and then I was trying to talk myself down in the middle of the night. I was like, “Okay, self-soothe.” I was like, “How did my parents help me deal with this?” Maybe this is why I’m so bad at dealing with nightmares, because it was awful. My dad would sit me down, and he would be like, “Megana, think about logic.”
Craig: Oh, Dr. Rao. You know what I would do? My daughter would have the full-on night terrors when she was young.
John: Night terrors where she wakes up screaming and [inaudible 00:59:31].
Craig: What would happen is she would walk out. I was staying up late working. She would come on out of her room. She was in tears. I would understand, okay, she had a terrible nightmare. First of all, I would make her go pee, because that’s 90% of it. I would put her back to bed. I would make sure to spray my anti-monster spray, which is the opposite of what Dr. Rao did. What Dr. Rao did was just deny your feelings, just invalidate your experience completely, and not help you at all.
John: Craig, where do you get the anti-monster spray?
Craig: I would tell her that it was quite expensive and it was precious, and I had to keep it hidden and safe, just so that it was always there. Of course, she understood there was no monster spray, just as she understood there was no monsters. Nonetheless, again, unlike Dr. Rao…
John: You were validating her feelings.
Craig: Validation and soothing. I would say, Megana, what you ought to do next time you wake up from a nightmare is just spray some anti-monster spray around you.
Megana: Maybe I’ll do that, get some lavender aromatherapy spray or something.
Craig: No no no no no no no. You don’t understand. You hold an imaginary thing in your hand and you shh. That’s how you do it. I don’t understand what you thought… The lavender was not going to work. You need monster spray.
Megana: I see. You weren’t even holding anything.
Craig: Lord, no. If I had been holding something, she would’ve been like, “That’s not going to work.” You need to understand that there’s something supernatural in my hand that’s going to work, and therefore it must be invisible.
Megana: I see. I see.
Craig: God, you’re a nightmare person.
John: Thank you both.
Craig: Thanks.
John: Bye.
Megana: Bye.
Craig: Bye.
Links:
- Craig went to Comic Con 2022 to Moderate a Mythic Quest Panel
- Will Netflix be Alright? by Dave Karpf
- God John’s 1998 short film
- Stray Annapurna videogame
- Raising the Stakes videos
- How to Make a Blockbuster Trailer
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Adam Pineless (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.