Scriptnotes, Episode 578: Any Given Wednesday, Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it. Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 578 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Often when we have guests on the show, I am meeting them for the first time right before we start recording. My guests today I’ve known for almost 30 years, which is impossible, Al Gough and Miles Millar, the writer/producers known for Smallville, Shanghai Noon, Into the Badlands, and a zillion other movies and TV series. Their latest is the Netflix hit series Wednesday. Welcome Al and Miles.

Al Gough: Good to see you.

Miles Millar: Absolutely. Great.

John: We actually went to film school together a thousand years ago.

Al: Yes, we did, 1992.

John: 1992. I want to get into a little bit of that. Maybe in our Bonus Segment, let’s talk about film schools, because Craig hates film schools. It was actually incredibly important for the three of us. I think we can get the other side of film school and whether we would do it again.

Miles: I think the answer for all of us is yes.

John: I think it would be yes, but I might do it differently this time. We’ll see when we get into that. That’ll be our Bonus Segment. For you guys right now, I really want to start by contrasting… I remember as your whole career began. Usually, this would be the point where I would ask you to do an origin story. Let me see if I can give the origin story, Al and Miles, see how much I get right and what stuff I get wrong. Al Gough, before you came out for film school, you were working some place in the East Coast. You went to Washington University?

Al: No, I went to Catholic University in Washington, D.C.

John: Catholic University in Washington, D.C. Something like that. You came out to Stark with the intention of becoming a producer.

Al: Correct.

John: Miles Millar, you came from the UK. You had been working in London before that?

Miles: Yep.

John: You came into the program, the Stark Program at USC, with the intention of being a producer, or did you also know you were going to write?

Miles: I didn’t know what I was going to do. It was my excuse to get to America. That was really the reason. I loved the idea of film. I’d been obsessed with film my whole life. That was my dream. I didn’t really know how to navigate Hollywood. The program felt like a grab bag of you figure it out.

John: That’s honestly very close to my experience there too. I knew I could write in a general sense, but I had no sense of how Hollywood worked. It was my introduction to everything. We should explain to people listening what 1992 was like. It was pre-internet, basically.

Al: It was pre-internet. Also, we say the party was over, but the after-party was starting. Corporations buying movie studios was just becoming a thing. I think Sony had bought Columbia. I think at that point, Matsushita had bought Universal.

Miles: Turner had bought-

Al: Not yet. That wasn’t until ’94.

Miles: It was a gold rush era.

Al: It was a gold rush era.

Miles: It was incredible.

John: It’s important for how we all came up and rose into it, because it was definitely a period of great expansion that we were coming into it. You guys met in our very small film program. Only 25 students per year in that group. How quickly did you hit it off as friends and then did you start thinking about writing together? That’s where I’m not quite clear, because it was in that first year you must’ve started writing together.

Al: We were friends almost… I think we met the second day of film school.

Miles: Yeah, we had that cocktail party. USC film school had this bizarre, brutalist architecture. It had this garden well, where there was a bad cocktail party we had for students.

John: It was a kegger really.

Miles: Exactly right.

Al: A kegger, yeah.

Miles: We met there. At the end, I gave Al my phone number. I’m terrible. I’m the worst with numbers.

Al: Terrible.

Miles: I gave him the wrong number, so he couldn’t get in touch with me. A few days later, he said, “I tried to reach you.” I was like, “Oh, whoops.” We did hit it off immediately.

Al: Miles is terrible with numbers still.

Miles: I have to copy his-

Al: I do the WGA dues, and then I take a picture of it and send it to him.

Miles: I’m always [crosstalk 00:03:44].

John: You guys eventually hit it off. In our first year of Stark, we were writing scenes. We had a class taught by Bobette Buster. We were writing scenes for that, and we were writing individual scenes. You guys were separately trying to work on some stuff together?

Al: No, because remember, she partnered us up.

John: Did you?

Al: I think we all did an outline and 30 pages.

Miles: It was the outline and the first act of a screenplay. You had to partner up with someone. I love this story, by the way, because we had to partner up. I partner with Al. My story was the worst story. It was a very commercial idea, but found out later on it was the worst story as a professional writer, which was a story about a cop and an orangutan, because they were buddies, called Mango. Al lost faith in me pretty quickly and tried to bail. Luckily for us, the head of the program, Larry Turman, who is the producer of The Graduate, told him he couldn’t do it, that he couldn’t bail on me, and so he was forced to work with me. Lucky he did, because…

Al: Then that led to Mango, led to the first sale.

John: What was crucial to understand about this origin story is that you guys wrote this project together. You had the initial idea, but you end up working on it as a team. In our second year of Stark, you end up selling this spec script for a lot of money.

Al: That’s another thing too, which we tell young writers. Again, it was a different era. Where now we’re in the era of IP and everything, there it was literally the era of spec scripts. It was Shane Black and Joe Eszterhas and all of that.

Miles: Every day you’d go to Variety and you’d read five scripts sold for a lot of money, and they were high-concept stories, and first-timers breaking in every day. It really was this gold rush mentality of you just needed to get the story out, and people would buy the idea. It was really amazing, all of us, the three of us to launch at that point as writers, because it allowed us… We always talk about the [inaudible 00:05:36] to learn how to write. Without that sale, we wouldn’t have been able to do it. It was all about the gift of that era.

John: As we all know, Mango got an immediate green light and went on to make $200 million. It was a giant hit that made your whole career. No, Mango did not get made, and yet it did start your career. Let’s talk through that, because going from a sale, which doesn’t really happen so much… A spec sale of a script doesn’t happen that often anymore. There are scripts that get attention, and then people go off in meetings. That’s really an important next step for you guys is not that Mango happened, got shot as a film, but you guys were taken seriously. You got agents and managers, got started with a career.

Al: Exactly. As Miles was saying, we sold Mango. It was the week after Ace Ventura opened. Some of it, you hit the right moment. People loved the concept. They liked the writing enough. What we found is then you go for these general meetings at Disney, at New Line, Warner’s, and they’re offering you animal comedies. This is not what you want to be known for.

Miles: It was literally our very first script. It was total beginner’s luck. We didn’t know really the craft of writing yet, so we spent the next three years working every day. We’ve always had a really good joint work ethic. I’m sure John does too. It’s all about not the grind, but it’s really about treating it as a profession, that there’s never a day when we’re not writing. That’s something that’s I think stood us well in terms of we just keep on working. We’re workhorses, and we’ll always do that. Even when it’s hard, we’ll still work.

John: It’s also important though to think back to that time and the expansion of the industry. It’s not just that there were spec scripts selling. The reason why there were spec scripts selling is because they were trying to make so many movies.

Miles: Correct.

John: That was also an era where Disney was trying to do 40 feature films a year.

Al: Yeah, each division, Disney, Touchstone, and Hollywood Pictures were each making 25 movies a year, because it was also the era of DVDs. Basically, even if a movie didn’t make all its money back in theatrical, the DVD aftermarkets were huge. A lot of them got made.

Miles: There’s a similar era now in terms of content. The streamers desperately need content. It’s not dissimilar. I think for writers, it was a better period when we started out, just in terms of you could hit the jackpot, literally.

John: Coming off of Mango, what was the next big step in your career? I was trying to [inaudible 00:08:03] is there another big thing, like, “Oh, that’s a shining beacon,” before we get to Smallville?

Al: Oh, yeah. We wrote a couple more specs. The next one we sold was a political thriller called Favorite Son. We sold it to… It was a producer named Leonard Goldberg. He was Aaron Spelling’s partner.

John: Absolutely. He did Charlie’s Angels.

Al: Exactly. We sold it to Laura Ziskin, who was a producer we all had as a film school teacher, who was then running a division of 20th Century Fox. For us, that was the first script that was… It was a great sample, and it opened different doors. I think that’s the great thing about being a writer is you don’t need permission, and you can always write yourself out of any corner. Finally, with that script, we were able to do that. It just got us out of the animal comedy cul-de-sac.

John: Absolutely. I was pigeonholed as a guy who’d do movies about gnomes, elves, dwarves, and Christmas, very soft family things. Then Go was the thing that got me out of that.

Al: Go, right.

John: People could read it for whatever they wanted to do. You have written Favorite Son. That gets set up at Fox 2000?

Al: Fox 2000, yeah.

John: From that, you’re taking other meetings. Are you getting any rewrite work? What’s the next step?

Miles: We’ve been a little bit in the rewrite business but not really. It’s never been something that we’ve had time to do or focused on, because then we pretty quickly got into TV. We had an agency change. We changed agencies and went to William Morris, and then they put us with a TV agent as well as a feature agent, because we’d done… Our first TV credit was this British BBC show called Bugs. That was our first-

John: Oh, that’s right. I forgot about Bugs.

Miles: It was a really obscure but fun BBC show.

Al: It was an action-adventure series. The reason they liked us is because Miles is British and I was American. They couldn’t find British writers who could write Mission Impossible type stories, which is what these were.

Miles: That got us when we went to William Morris. They’re like, “Oh, you do TV. You should have a TV agent.”

John: Because it was a UK show, you were not in a room with a staff writing that show.

Miles: No.

John: You pitched an episode, wrote an episode.

Miles: We used to fax the pages to them in London. That’s how old we are. It was a great experience. Then that led to our interest in TV. Then we started staffing on TV. We met some writers. They said the way to be successful in television is, just fair enough, you have to learn the hierarchy, and you’ve gotta go up from staff writer to story editor to the various stages of TV writer. We did that. Our first TV credit in America was Timecop, which is based on the Jean-Claude Van Damme movie.

John: ABC show? I’m trying to remember.

Miles: ABC, yeah.

Al: ABC.

John: Did it run for a season?

Al: No, I think it ran for eight, and then it was out.

Miles: It was an era they thought TV drama was dead, but sitcoms were the king. The idea of doing that show… You have to sign a three-year contract. It was like, “Oh my god, if we do this for three years, I will literally die.” It ran for eight. We were heroes on that show, because there was such infighting with the young guys on the totem pole. We ended up writing… Was it three scripts?

Al: Yeah, we wrote three of the eight.

Miles: Three.

Al: One of ours became the new first episode, because ABC hated the pilot episode of the show. With writers too, we call it the “fuck you, I’m doing Nazis” approach. When they were pitching the show, ABC said, “Whatever you do in Timecop, don’t have them go back to Nazi Germany, because Germany’s a huge market for us, and we don’t want to do it.” What did they do? They go back to Nazi Germany and stop something. That started.

There was no room on that show. You’d go pitch to the executive producer. We did, and then we wrote the script. He came in, and he goes, “Yep, this one’s going to be the first episode.” Timecop. Then we got our first pilot at ABC from that, which got made but didn’t go to air. Then we staffed on a show that Carlton Cuse created called Martial Law.

John: That’s right.

Al: That’s the TV side of the story. Then meanwhile, on the feature side, we had done some work for Joel Silver and Dick Donner on these low-budget genre movies, which led to Lethal Weapon 4.

John: I remember visiting set with you on a movie you’d written that starred Heather Locklear.

Miles: That was called Double Tap. That was our very first feature credit. It was directed by Greg Yaitanes, who is now a huge TV director. He just did House of the Dragon.

Al: House of the Dragon.

John: That’s right.

Miles: It’s weird we’re all still here. Those were really cheap movies, but we learned a lot doing those. We never said no. That was also our thing. We always just said yes to anything, and still do. That’s part of our problem is never saying no. We’re not as selective as John.

John: There’s also two of you, so you can get twice as much done. Are we almost caught up to Smallville at this point?

Al: Yes. On the TV side, during Martial Law, we got a deal at Warner Bros, and we did this show from Lethal Weapon 4 with the producer, Joel Silver, called The Strip, which was an action buddy thing set in Las Vegas. We’d sold it to Fox. They had a regime change. A thing that did happen in 1999 was you’d sell a pilot to another network. They sold it to UPN, which was another network that no longer exists. Because it was on UPN and was so under the radar, they let us run the show. We really hit it off with Peter Roth.

Miles: He was the head of Warner Bros.

Al: He was the head of Warner’s Television, just retired a year or two ago. They made an overall deal with us. The Strip ran eight episodes, got canceled.

Miles: First-time showrunners, we had no idea what we were doing. I’ll say for the first three pilots, we had no idea what we were doing. Then it began to click in terms of what we needed to do and be set forward. There’s always this thing about showrunning, which is you’re basically two guys in a garage writing scripts, and suddenly you’re in charge of a huge business, and they expect you to know what you’re doing, and you don’t.

John: You also had very few opportunities for mentorship, because you’d been on some sets, with Double Tap and things like that, I guess Martial Law. You have seen some of it. Was Martial Law shot in Los Angeles?

Al: It was, yeah. You’re right, you don’t really get that much-

Miles: You’re stuck in the writers’ room.

Al: You’re stuck in the writers’ room. We had a deal. At that point, I always tell people there was no Marvel Cinematic Universe. The later iteration of Superman had been Lois and Clark. The last iteration of Batman had been Batman and Robin. This was like the Nadir of superheros. Warner’s, who was like, “Sure, TV, you can have Superman,” they didn’t care.

Peter Roth came to us and said, “I have the rights to do Superman, and I want to do kind of like a Superboy show. We were like, “We don’t want to do Superboy.” We came up with the pitch for Smallville, which was no flights, no tights, making the parents younger, introducing the idea of the meteor shower and all these different things.

Then we went out and sold… We only went to Fox and to The WB. What was funny at the time is The WB and Warner’s Studio did not have a good relationship. Peter was brought in to smooth it over. They had just pitched them the idea of like, “Oh, we’re doing a Superman in high school show.” They’re like, “Eh.” They weren’t interested.

Miles: This is the era of Dawson’s Creek.

Al: Dawson’s Creek, yeah. We went to Fox, and we sold it in the room to Gail Berman. Then that afternoon, we had to go to The WB, just because they’re corporate siblings. Peter’s like, “Just go in. Pitch it. It doesn’t matter. We’re not going to sell it. We’re going to sell it to Fox.” We go in and pitch it to The WB, to an executive named Susanne Daniels. It’s one of those things, you could tell during the pitch. In the beginning, it was a little like sitting back, and then as they heard the pitch, they were like, “Oh, this might actually be good.” Then by the end, we left, and we’re like, “Oh, that went better than we thought.” Peter’s like, “We’re going to Fox.” Then three days later, we were at The WB, which is where it should’ve been.

Miles: The great story there is that the other executive in the room, who’s a friend of ours, we’d had lunch with the year before, and she’d told us point blank, “You guys aren’t WB material. Sorry.”

Al: “You do buddy action,” because at that point we’d done Lethal 4 and Shanghai Noon. “You’re buddy two-hander guys.” Then the next year, we’re at The WB.

John: I want to compare and contrast that experience, taking an iconic piece of property, a piece of IP that people know, Superman, and turning it into a teen show, to Wednesday, which is, again, an iconic piece of property everybody knows, and taking the character from that and putting it at the center of a teen series. On the surface, kind of similar, but actually, the way we make things now is so vastly different between the two of them. I want to contrast the two of those experiences. Let’s talk through the pitch on Wednesday Addams. How does Wednesday Addams come into your universe?

Al: It was 2018. We had just finished doing this show called Into the Badlands, which we did for AMC for four seasons. We were, frankly, looking for our next thing, and knowing how IP-obsessed everybody is… The Addams Family seemed to be… We knew MGM had the animated movies, but Paramount had done movies.

In a similar way that Smallville tells an unknown chapter of Clark Kent’s story, it’s a story nobody’s ever told. We wanted to do Wednesday, but we’re like, “Teenage Wednesday Addams in boarding school.” That was really the eureka moment. We sat down. We knew we wanted it to be a supernatural murder mystery. We talked about do we just put her in a normal high school or do we do something different. We realized if we just put her in a normal high school, it becomes a very one-note show.

Miles: She goes home to her family at the end.

Al: She went home to her family. The opening of the first episode is her in a regular high school. She gets expelled, and then she goes to Nevermore, because it gave us the Addams ethos without being the… It’s like if you took the Addams mansion and the Addams vibe but then you put it in the school. Then it was the school where her parents met. Literally, we had the idea. We came up with the whole pitch.

Miles: We did it on spec.

Al: On spec.

Miles: We wrote a 20-page bible.

Al: Bible.

Miles: Then we approached MGM, said to the head of the studio, “Okay, this is what we want to do,” and he loved it. It was the first step. It was the first step with us coming up with the idea. It wasn’t like they approached us.

Al: Nobody approached us.

John: There wasn’t any notion, like, “Hey, let’s do a Wednesday Addams show.”

Al: No, it wasn’t.

John: [inaudible 00:18:40].

Al: In fact, they didn’t even know if they had the live-action TV rights. We were like, “Does Paramount have those?” We pitched the head of the Addams Foundation, who controls the estate. He loved it. That’s how it all got started. It was very different. Smallville was like, “We have this idea. Can you guys crack it?” This one, we brought them something they didn’t frankly even know they had.

John: Great. In both cases, the idea is now set up. Was the idea set up at Netflix, or did you have to write a script first?

Miles: Now it seems like a no-brainer, but it wasn’t at all. It’s been a three-and-a-half-year journey to get to this point. We’d written it. They loved it. In terms of the pitch, we went out and pitched it around to all the different streamers, to Apple and Amazon, Netflix. Actually, Netflix bought it. This is great.

Al: This was fall of 2019. This was this time 2019.

Miles: They couldn’t make a deal, so it fell apart.

John: It fell apart. They couldn’t make a deal because of underlying rights or your rights or just everything?

Al: Basically, whatever Netflix was offering, MGM said, “That’s not enough.” This was basically January of 2020. They had already basically given us the go-ahead to write the pilot script. They’d written that. We thought it was kind of dead. Then Steve Stark, who was the head of television at the time-

Miles: At MGM.

Al: … at MGM, convinced MGM to basically fork over money for a writers’ room, for a mini room, and said, “We’ll write a bunch of scripts, and then we’ll go back out with it,” which to be honest with you, is a terrible idea. Most streamers aren’t going to buy a show that they had no hand in developing. We were like, “If it keeps the project alive, great.”

John: That said, Station Eleven was a similar situation.

Al: Was it really?

John: He came on to talk through the Station Eleven process. Paramount did put together a mini room for that, so they could write scripts. It ended up working out really well for them.

Al: Same here.

John: At this point, there’s a pilot, and you have a room together. How many scripts are you trying to get out of this room?

Al: We’re trying to get another seven scripts out of the room.

John: Which is the whole season.

Al: The whole season, because we had the bible for the whole season, and so we were breaking it. Of course, we had to push the room a week, because it was literally the first week of lockdown. The pandemic started. We did it fully on Zoom.

Miles: Which I think was a really great… No one had ever done a Zoom room. It was actually incredibly efficient, because often my beef of writers’ rooms is everyone sits around talking about war stories. It’s so inefficient, whereas a Zoom, it’s actually much more focused. It can be exhausting, but we got an incredible amount of work done in a limited amount of time.

Al: Yeah, we did. We did. It was spring of 2020. Before we went out, we wanted to package it. Tim was always our first-

John: A natural choice.

Al: A natural choice.

John: Tim’s always wanted to do an Addams Family story.

Al: We’d heard. Of course, everybody’s like, “He’s not done television. He’s not going to do it.” We’re like, “If we don’t ask, the answer’s no.” Steve’s partner, Andrew Mittman, got the script to Mike Simpson, who’s Tim’s agent at WME. Mike read it and really loved it. We heard all this later. He sent it to Tim, and then four days later, we get a text, “You’re not going to believe this. Tim read the script. He really loves it. He wants to talk to you guys.” Tim lives in London. We thought, “Okay, great, so his assistant’s going to set up Zoom?” He’s like, “Nope.” Mike goes, “I’m texting you his number, and you’re going to FaceTime with him tomorrow.” It was Memorial Day weekend 2020. We called. We FaceTimed with Tim. He was in Oxford.

Miles: Oxford. He has an amazing house in Oxford with this beautiful garden with these life-size dinosaur models. He was out there wandering around in this garden talking to us about Wednesday Addams and how she would’ve been his girlfriend in high school. It was really, really great. He was a bit nervous, I think, about launching to TV, but also really intrigued about doing extended storytelling. Long-form storytelling was something he’d never done. It was really something that he thought would be a great challenge. He’d always loved the Addams Family, and Wednesday in particular.

Al: What we did know, the opening of the script, it opens with Wednesday terrorizing the water polo team. We didn’t know Tim played water polo in Burbank.

Miles: At Burbank High.

Al: He must’ve been reading the script going, “What is happening?”

Miles: That’s how it happened.

John: I want to also flash back to Smallville though, because bringing on the pilot director has always been a big thing. That’s a big deciding factor of which pilots get ordered is what kind of director you can get on board, but they’re never the iconic name that a Tim Burton is.

Al: Correct.

John: It’s never that level of [inaudible 00:23:23] directors. It’s always like Michael Dinner. It’s some person you’ve never heard of.

Miles: Michael Dinner, yeah.

John: Normal people don’t have that. It’s such a change from this. Also, in a classic way you pick pilots to make, it’s on a casting. For Smallville, talk through the casting on that, because I remember my WB show, the way you had to bring in actors to audition in the room in front of Susanne Daniels and everything else was a very specific, scary, terrifying process. I want to contrast it with now. Talk us through Smallville casting, and then we’ll go to Wednesday casting.

Al: Again, this was in 2000. We sold it in the fall of 2000. When we sold it, it’s interesting. In old-time network television, they usually didn’t let you cast a pilot until they green-lit the pilot. Here they bought the project and they said, “We’re going to let you start casting.” We hadn’t written the script yet.

Miles: We hadn’t written the script yet.

Al: This was actually a great exercise, which we’ve done. We don’t really do it in features, but we do it in television. We wrote a bunch of the scenes from the pilot that they could audition with. It’s good, because you realize you can give them handles. We always call it secret lines, where if they get that right, it’s like, “Oh, they understand it.” We wrote a Lex and Clark scene.

Miles: All of which ended up in the show.

Al: All of them are in the pilot. It was a Clark-Lana graveyard scene, which is in the pilot. There’s a Lex-Clark fencing scene, which is in the pilot, the parents, which was great, because when we went to write the pilot, we had a bunch of scenes written already. They let us do that. We actually got to spend about four months casting. The other thing was, we knew exactly who we wanted to direct the pilot, which was David Nutter, who certainly at the time-

John: He was [inaudible 00:25:08] him or Michael Dinner [crosstalk 00:25:09].

Al: David was the Steven Spielberg of TV pilots. His track record of getting-

Miles: He’d done a lot of great… Not The X-Files. He’d done a lot of X-Files to start off with.

Al: He’d done X-Files to start off. I think he’d done Roswell the year before.

Miles: Dark Angel.

Al: He’d done Dark Angel. What’s great is Peter Roth, who had just come over from Fox, knew David very well. He literally got on the phone, pitched him, sent him the same-

Miles: David was a huge Superman-

Al: He was a huge Superman fan.

Miles: It was the perfect marriage. The process, as John suggested, it’s so awful, which is the person, or they have to sit in the room outside, and have to come into a room with probably 15 people watching them, which is the most artificial experience for TV performance, and have to perform like they’re auditioning for a school play, in front of these people. It is the most nerve-wracking experience. For example, Zach Levi was our top choice for Lex Luthor. He came in and was amazing. Then he came in to do this network audition, and he really just didn’t click. Then we ended up with Michael, who was fantastic. It was just the whole process and the idea of having to perform in this really bizarre way for a TV show.

Al: It was always very weird. It’s stressful all around.

Miles: Absolutely.

Al: So artificial.

John: Also, we have to remember that back in those days, these truly were pilots. They were going to shoot a bunch of pilots and only pick up certain series, as they were trying to figure out what are the elements that are going to be useful in this show versus that show. It’s not the same situation with something like Wednesday, because it’s the first episode, but how that first episode goes is not going to determine whether the rest of the series shoots. You’re going to shoot the whole series.

Al: Correct. We even had this on our last couple shows. Everybody now does it online. They self-tape. I think actors must think it’s great, because they can do as many takes as they want until they get the one they like.

John: They don’t get the feedback.

Al: They don’t get the feedback, but they get that.

John: Also, we’re seeing what do they look like through a lens.

Miles: Exactly.

John: It’s really what it is.

Miles: That’s the point, exactly. It’s the old-fashioned screen test is how you should do it. On Wednesday, I’ll say we did do chemistry tests over Zoom. We’d all meet with the actor, talk to them, and then our screens would go black, and then we’d watch the audition. Then we’d give notes and Tim would give notes. I think it was intimidating, because it was the first time they met Tim, and over Zoom. The first time we did it, Tim just gave them one chance. They were so nervous.

Al: We did it once, and it was a disaster. What’s great about Tim is Tim Burton doesn’t realize he’s Tim Burton. We’re like, “Tim, here’s what we’re going to do. We’ll introduce them. We’ll introduce you, let you say hi. We’ll do it twice, so you can give them notes in between. Even if you don’t have notes, let’s just let them do it again.” Then he was like, “Great.” Once they got over the initial shock of the Tim Burton part, then they could ease in and do it. Even on the Brady Bunch screens, you could at least go, “Oh, okay.” You see what they look like side by side on camera.

John: Which is crucial. I want to back up in the process a little bit here, because you’d been in writers’ rooms before. You’d been in a writer’s room for Martial Law. You had that experience. This time you’re running a writers’ room on Zoom for your show. How did you go about thinking about who you wanted in that writers’ room with you? It was a mini room. Was that the only room you ever got together?

Al: That was a mini room. We frankly picked two writers, Kayla Alpert and April Blair. We knew.

John: Experienced.

Al: They were like, “We’re going to pay for a room. You can only have a couple writers.” It’s like, “We need people who we’ve worked with before, who we know are good, who can be helpful.” Obviously, we wanted the female voices in the room too. We heard a lot of Zoom room horror stories, but I think because it was a bunch of people who have never worked together, so I’m sure it was a lot of bad first date theater. We had that room. It was a 10, 11-week room. That was the only room we had.

John: What was your schedule? What was your writing process? How long were the rooms going for? What were you trying to get done in a day’s work in a room?

Miles: I think first it’s having a very clear idea of where the trajectory of the season’s going. We just had the first episode, so they had a sense of what the show was, which is important.

John: It’s crucial to set up… That first episode, you set so many plates spinning in terms of who these characters are, and each of them is going to have a thing. You had a sense of where they were going. You had to actually track out where that information would go. Those were the first weeks. You were just figuring out all the rest of those-

Miles: Yes. I think the first season, we certainly had ideas. I guess because we’re old-school TV people, every episode, unlike some binge shows, conceptualized. One episode’s about the school dance. One episode’s about Parents Weekend. Each one feels like a complete chapter of a book, rather than just… Sometimes shows are like mud. You couldn’t identify what the-

John: It’s like an eight-hour movie.

Miles: For us it’s much more compartmentalized. It’s figuring out the beginning, middle, end of each episode so it feels complete in itself, although it still leads on and has this propulsive energy, which is always something that we aim for, that it’s never boring. That’s our motto in terms of story breaking, that it has to keep going so it’s propulsive and delicious and you want to keep consuming. You want to be able to not turn it off at 3 a.m. in the morning and finish. That’s our goal as storytellers is that it has to be relentless. Then it’s really working out the beats and where are the characters going, so what’s the arc over the course of the season and how will that person get there.

The first week is just figuring out big ideas, what a great set piece is, where do you want to see these characters, what are the scenes you want to see with them. That’s something we learned from Carlton Cuse, which is what are the scenes you want to see in this episode, between these two characters. That was something that we always do, and just like, “What are the craziest ideas we can put Wednesday Addams in?” That’s something. It’s just an exercise. We always ask people when they first come to the room to bring a lot of ideas. I want to see a list of 50 ideas. Where could she be, what’s funny, and what situations or locations she could be at or just concepts for [inaudible 00:31:27].

John: What documents are you trying to get out of this? Ultimately, you’re going to get to scripts. At what point are you generating outlines? Are you generating beat sheets? How much are those shared outside of the room or just for your purposes?

Al: We do cards.

Miles: The first thing we do is we break out the stories. We do the little paragraphs.

Al: Paragraphs.

Miles: By the end of probably week two, we have eight one-page ideas for what each episode’s going to be. It has to be really quick and fast. You can adjust.

John: Is that a Google Doc, or how are you sharing that among your team?

Miles: It’s Google Docs.

Al: It is a Google Doc.

Miles: We have the writer’s assistant who takes notes every day and assembles that. We split up to write the one-pagers we call them, which is just each episode, so we have a sense of what the season is, because you can’t spend too long conceptualizing. We just need to start really thinking about the stories.

Al: We did the one-pagers. Then we do beat sheets. Those have, here are all the scenes.

John: The scenes.

Al: They’re in skeletal form. The other thing, we had never done a closed mystery, a cards down mystery, where you don’t know, it’s the whodunit.

John: Absolutely. We have the same information as the audience as Wednesday does.

Al: Exactly. We knew how it ended. Then it was working backwards. Then it was do we have enough red herrings. Even when we were shooting it, we’re like-

Miles: Oh, gosh.

Al: … “Oh my god, is this going to be too obvious?” It’s all the red herrings. You have to play by the rules, so that if you go back and did a re-watch, it’s… I remember there’s one thing we caught in the first episode. We’re like, “Oh, that character could never be there at that time, so we can’t do that.” You’re doing the math of it. There was that aspect. Then once we broke them out, then I think we verbally pitched out to the studio at that point, just to get their feedback.

John: The studio being Netflix.

Al: No, actually at the time, just MGM.

John: Just MGM, that’s right, because [inaudible 00:33:26]. You’re pitching them to make sure that they understand what the vision is for the things.

Al: Correct.

John: They’re not reading things.

Al: Not yet. Once we got their thoughts and sign off, then we went and we did 10-page outlines.

Miles: Our whole philosophy always is to, I’d say overshare. There’s no surprises is our thing.

Al: I think they got the one-pagers. They got the one-pagers.

Miles: For us it’s always about we have nothing to hide. If you try and hide things or keep people at bay… We’re really looking for great notes and not guidance, but it’s great to have some… You’re stuck in a room. Even if it’s a Zoom room, you’re stuck in this little bubble. To have some outside viewpoint about what you’re doing, for us is always very helpful. It’s true with the whole process in terms of what we do. We’ll take a good note from literally anybody.

Al: Because everybody’s a viewer. Even if it’s their job, everybody’s still a viewer.

Miles: It doesn’t mean we’re going to take it.

Al: It doesn’t mean we’re going to listen.

Miles: We’re incredibly open and say to the actors, to everybody that we want feedback and need feedback. It’s always about the best product. That process goes all the way to the end, to ADR, to the post, to everything. It’s always about evolving until you finish.

John: Let’s run through the documents again. We’re starting off with these one-paragraph synopses of episodes. Then it goes to a beat sheet. Then it goes to a 10-page outline. Then from 10-page outline, those are assigned to a writer to write the full 60-page script.

Al: Correct.

Miles: I will say before that as well, we have the bible, and then we usually do a look book as well, so they have a sense of what [crosstalk 00:35:02].

John: Before they got there, they were looking through that.

Miles: Yeah, so they have a sense of what the show will look like in our minds. We shared that with Tim. It’s always about the communication, and everyone’s on the same page about what we’re doing. It’s always about that clarity of vision, “This is the show we’re going to make. This is what we’re doing,” so there’s no confusion, and keeping the lines of communication open between every department, which is hard.

John: Are all these scripts written by the time this room finishes?

Al: No. I would say four of the eight were written, and there were four that there were drafts for.

John: Great. Let’s take a moment and contrast that back to Smallville, because this was not at all the schedule on Smallville. Smallville, you’re shooting, rather than 8 episodes over the course of however long it takes, you had 22 episodes to shoot.

Al: 22 episodes.

John: These are 40-page scripts probably?

Al: I think Season 1, they were probably 50-page scripts. Probably they were too long.

John: They were long. You’re responsible for delivering basically one of these a week.

Miles: It was an absolute nightmare. The first season of Smallville is a total blur of insanity and sleepless nights and just us hammering away. Also, in the middle of this, we had 9/11, and we didn’t stop shooting for that. It was just a really crazy time. That’s where we really learned how to run a show. The first season was absolute chaos. The writers hated us. We used to write all day, turn up at work at 6 p.m., work until 12. It was just [inaudible 00:36:29] horror stories of writers’ rooms, that first season was like, oh my god.

John: That was you?

Al: Yeah, that was us.

Miles: Yeah, because you don’t know. It’s like a freight train, and then it becomes a hit, so you have this added pressure and then the studio. It’s just overwhelming.

Al: You have a process that moves twice as fast, but you have two levels. You have a studio giving notes and then a network giving notes.

John: The other crucial thing though is you are also not writing these scripts in a vacuum like you were in this mini room.

Al: Correct.

John: You were trying to write these things while you’re actually trying to produce the show.

Miles: Exactly.

John: You’re dealing with all the fires happening on set while you’re doing this and dealing with the post. In this case, you had the luxury, you had these… How long was your mini room? Was it 10 weeks, 12 weeks?

Miles: Yeah.

John: To just focus on the writing and not focus on anything else.

Miles: I’ll say the difference is that I think [inaudible 00:37:13] on a streaming show, on a show like this, is every episode has to be a Faberge egg-

John: Wow.

Miles: … whereas on network, you know you’re going to have some clunkers. You know that not every script’s going to be great. It doesn’t take the pressure off, but it’s impossible to have 22 amazing episodes of network TV.

Al: What was interesting too with Smallville, it was the era where TV on DVD was starting to become a thing. We would say Wednesday is chapters of a book, where Smallville is short stories in a world. You have some mythology episodes and some bigger ideas that then tie the whole season together, because they tell you an avid viewer of a network show watches one in four episodes. There’s a certain amount of repetition, at least in the first season, where you’re starting, where you don’t want people to be like, “I watched the pilot, and then I’m coming in an episode. What the heck’s happening now?”

Miles: It’s not a sausage factory, but it kind of is, in terms of there is that repetition. Then once you get into the rhythm of a writers’ room, it’s still incredibly difficult to turn out 22 good episodes of TV. It becomes a machine. That’s certainly what we aimed for and achieved in subsequent seasons in terms of the writers’ room and everything else became a machine.

Al: We trained people. It’s another thing too. It sounds weird. The show tells you what it can and can’t do. I think in Season 1, we had to break so many more stories that didn’t work to get to the 22 episodes that did.

Miles: [inaudible 00:38:41] in terms of what it wants to do. Everything’s always too big.

Al: It’s too big, and I get blamed.

John: You’re learning what your cast can do. You’re learning what your crew can do.

Al: Exactly.

John: You’re learning, “Okay, we can do two stunts or whatever it is for your thing, so how are we going to budget our two stunts for this?”

Al: Exactly.

Miles: Exactly right.

Al: Exactly right.

Miles: You have to figure out what’s the pattern of what you can do. The first season of Smallville, we were resisting a pattern. It was like, “No, we’re going to do four stunts an episode. Then second season we’re going to make lives easier for ourselves. We’re going to find the pattern, then we’re going to do it.”

Al: We did, because at a certain point, a TV show either runs like a TV show or it implodes. Two of the Smallville stars are doing a podcast where they’re re-watching all the episodes. They had us do one. We watched this episode in Season 1, which literally four directors worked on, then we had to shut down for a week just to finish it. When we watched it back, it was actually a pretty good episode, but we’re like, “We were insane.” I’m like, “What were we thinking?”

John: Smallville was shot in Vancouver. For this show, you wanted to keep it nice and close and local, clearly.

Al: Absolutely.

John: You wanted to keep making life easy for yourself. Where did you choose to shoot Wednesday?

Al: We shot in Romania.

John: What was the decision for Romania?

Al: There’s a couple. One was, there was literally no studio space anywhere else in the world. We looked in Ireland. We looked in the UK.

John: If you were shooting this at the peak of coming out of pandemic…

Al: The studio wanted us to go to Toronto.

Miles: Toronto.

Al: The thing with Tim is, it’s the sets. You need the sound stages to be able to build these amazing sets.

John: Size.

Miles: It’s size. You’re looking at Tim’s work. It’s all about giant sets and physical sets. The studio was obsessed with us going to use The Handmaid’s Tale sound stages, but the roof with those sound stages is 12 feet or something.

Al: It was 19 feet.

Miles: 19 feet. [inaudible 00:40:37]. It was like, “We’re not going to do that,” because what you want with a Tim show is to have built sets. They also never accepted that. The show was budgeted like a CW show. As soon as you get Tim Burton directing the show, it’s not going to be a CW budget. They never understood that. The big fight with that show was always like, you don’t hire Tim Burton and give him that budget, because he’s not going to do it.

Al: We also said Tim doesn’t show up and go, “I’ll do the discount TV version of Tim.” Tim shoots as Tim shoots, one camera, very efficiently actually, but-

John: Romania.

Al: We ended up in Romania, because they actually had massive sound stages. There’s no tax credit there, but they do have crew. If you drew a longitude-latitude line from New England across, it actually hits Romania.

Miles: There’s an abandoned Soviet era studio, which was phenomenal, with huge sound stages. Then it had an area next to it of woods and a lake.

Al: Right outside the gate.

Miles: Then it had an area where you could build this huge town. It had these amazing architectural gems in the city of Bucharest, which we used as interior sets, with these beautiful decrepit villas. It just had such texture and reality to it. I went on a location scout with Tim. It was completely obvious we had to shoot there, and we did.

We’ve shot all over the world, in New Zealand and Ireland, Canada, but we’ve never shot in a country that didn’t speak the same language, the crew. It was challenging, and in the middle of COVID. Then we had the war happen in Ukraine, which neighbors Romania, which freaked out most of the cast. It was a very, very challenging shoot.

John: We were talking about the phases of getting things made. You have your writing phase. That’s all day. You have production phase. Challenging. Mostly done in Europe. Are you posting at the same time, or you’re waiting for all the post when everything’s done being shot? Were you shooting sequentially or were you cross-boarding the show?

Al: A couple things. We shot the show in blocks of two, but we didn’t go one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

Miles: Unfortunately.

Al: We did one, two, five, six, three, four, seven, eight.

Miles: Makes total sense.

Al: Part of it is because Catherine Zeta-Jones and Luis Guzman, who play Gomez and Morticia, are in Episodes 1 and 5, and we needed them to come to Romania once. Secondly, Tim was doing two blocks and needed time to prep.

John: A prep break.

Al: He wanted to do the first four. It was challenging, especially when you’re doing a mystery show and you’re trying to keep everything straight, and the actors are trying to keep their emotional arc straight. That was definitely a challenge. Tim’s editor was on site in Romania with us. We do all of our post at a place called Take 5 in Toronto. We’ve done that for the past three shows. What was interesting, even compared to our last show, is just all the technology.

John: It’s gotten so much better.

Al: It’s amazing.

Miles: Oh my god. In our last show, which is Into the Badlands, it used to be you go to a special studio and do a cineSync. It actually never worked. You’d talk to your editor live in Toronto, but the feed you’re getting back was slightly out of whack. It was never coordinated.

Al: Then you would have to go up for a week too.

Miles: I’d go up to Toronto.

Al: Just to sit in the rooms and finish everything.

Miles: Constantly fly up to Toronto. We were doing a show in New Zealand and Ireland at the same time, and then I’d fly to Toronto. It was an absolute nightmare. This was a dream experience. It’s completely synced up. You can talk to your editor.

John: You’re watching it on your laptop.

Miles: You’re talking to your editor on Zoom, watching the cut on your laptop. You can give notes in real time. It works incredibly well. The only thing you have to go for is now the sound mix. You go to a place in Hollywood, watch the sound mix. None of us went to Toronto. If we had to go from Romania to Toronto in COVID, you’d have to come back and spend 10 days in quarantine. It just wouldn’t have worked. Now technology is so… It’s really advanced in four or five years. It’s ridiculous.

Al: It was pretty incredible.

John: Great. We have some listener questions. I thought maybe you guys could help us out with some of the listener questions.

Al: Absolutely.

John: Let’s start with Hilary’s question.

Megana Rao: Hilary in Los Angeles asked, “I mentioned a feature idea I’m working on to an executive friend at a production company, and he said that if I tweak one insignificant bit of it, it’s exactly what they’re looking for for their new deal with a major streamer. He asked me to send him a one-pager of the feature and said that the streamer is paying for outlines and scripts. Is this different than No Writing Left Behind or is this essentially the same no-no, in that this executive could then use my one-pager at their will and cut me out completely?”

John: Let’s talk about No Writing Left Behind and when it’s appropriate to give somebody a written document versus not giving somebody a written document. You guys, you’re big on sharing. You’re big on showing stuff. In this case, it feels like Hilary’s written this original things, so she owns it and controls it. It feels pretty safe for her. What are you guys thinking?

Miles: I think maybe we’re dumb and naïve, but we always share. We have no problem leaving anything behind, because we’re fearless about what we have next. The chance of someone stealing something and executing something is minimal.

Al: I think again, she has the paper trail. The other thing too is you can always register with the Guild first so you have that stamp. Does that work?

John: It doesn’t really work. Let’s talk registering with the Guild, because obviously, I’ve followed the WGA for a long time. You can register your document with the WGA. Basically, they stick it in an envelope and say, “We sealed this envelope on this date.” It proves that it existed at a certain point in time. That’s no more meaningful than actually-

Al: Do it yourself.

John: … doing it yourself or showing an email that you sent it to somebody. It doesn’t do any more than that. It doesn’t provide an extra protection. I worry it’s basically what people feel good about, but it doesn’t necessarily do a thing. A situation where Hilary probably would not want to leave something behind, let’s say she’s one of six writers going in on a project, and you’re going out with your pitch, don’t leave them that pitch.

Al: Do not leave behind, because that’s when things can get used in the studio for parts.

John: Your details got moved into their thing.

Miles: That’s true.

Al: We have seen this, where you do have younger writers who are working with producers or a production company or a studio, and they’re just doing all this free work.

Miles: It’s just a bigger issue.

Al: You gotta stop. That’s just where it’s-

Miles: We worked with one writer. She hasn’t been paid. We’re supervising her. We were asked to come in for some producer friends of ours. She’s been working on this thing for three years. The pitch keeps getting delayed.

Al: It keeps getting pushed down. We’re like, “Guys, she’s been doing… This isn’t fair. She needs to be able to pitch this.” That’s incredibly frustrating.

John: Hilary should definitely, if she feels like writing up a one-page and sending it in, great, but if the guy keeps asking for more and more details-

Al: Do not. Do not.

John: … that’s when you start getting into problems.

Miles: That’s when you gotta say no.

John: Also, she has a whole script, so at some point just share the script.

Miles: Is it a script?

John: Yeah, she says it’s a script, or it’s a feature idea.

Miles: If it’s a finished script, then she’s fine.

John: Cool.

Megana: Mike from San Jose asks, “For someone who’s equally open to starting a career in either features or TV, does it even make sense to write spec feature scripts in the current environment? What I mean by that is, it appears that the vast majority of professional work nowadays is on the TV side of things. If a writer was to write a great feature spec, at best, it might lead them to an increasingly narrow field of work that appears to be getting narrower at a rapid pace, whereas a strong television pilot may perhaps help open the door to a much larger field of work opportunities. If equally interested in both, why would someone choose to write a feature spec in this current marketplace?”

John: This is a great question for where we were at 30 years ago versus where we’re at right now, because some people are writing TV spec pilots, but not really 30 years ago. Now, if you’re trying to staff a show, you might read a spec pilot, you might read a pilot, but you’d also read a feature. You’d read whatever, right?

Miles: Absolutely.

Al: Yeah, but I think it seems a sad reality that features are dying. I would never recommend anyone writing a feature, starting out now. I’d definitely aim at TV. That’s not a badge of shame anymore. We have Tim Burton directing now a TV show. It’s really changed everything. It’s an amazing opportunity now, what has happened. I think writing a 90-minute movie or a feature script is not the way to go, starting out.

Megana: Would you guys read a feature spec as a sample for a writers’ room?

Miles: Absolutely.

Al: Absolutely.

Megana: It’s not like what he’s saying.

Al: No, it’s not even church and state. We’d read it. It’s just the writer might have more opportunities with a spec pilot script to sell versus a spec feature script to sell. We read both.

Miles: Also, in terms of it takes half the time to write. It’s not as strict as a… It’s an easier option. It’s definitely I think the way to go. There’s more opportunity just for employment in television. What’s great, when you’re looking at a stack of scripts to read when you’re staffing a show, the shorter scripts are attractive. It really is.

Al: It’s true.

John: Although somebody could read the first half of the feature script and say, “Listen, I know this person can write. I want to meet this writer.” There are examples of TV pilots that are just… People read a random pilot, and they say, “I want to make this show.” Severance is a case of where it was just a great script and they said, “Let’s make this into a show.” That’s really rare from a person who has no TV experience, where they wrote a spec pilot and suddenly they’re shooting a show, where some movies can get made in different ways. There’s always cases of… Go was a spec script, and it sold and got made.

Miles: It’s just that I think the market for movies has shrunk and is shrinking. I think you have more opportunity in terms of selling, or even if you staff on a show and you have written three spec pilots that you can bring out and say, “Hey, I got this spec pilot that I wrote four years ago,” and present it as a new thing. It feels like there’s opportunities for your war chest of scripts.

Al: That’s where TV has gotten a little more like features, because it used to be with networks you’d write pilots every year. Then if that pilot didn’t go, it was like the pilot never existed. They didn’t go, “You had a great version of this last season. Why don’t you just do that pilot again?” Nobody ever did. Now it is more like you can have it in your drawer, because there’s not that machine of you’ve got to pick everything up in May, be shooting in July to be on the air in September. That whole system is gone with the wind.

John: One thing I think listeners may not understand is that… Let’s say you staff on a show. Let’s say you staff on Wednesday or staff on some other show, on a streamer show. You may have writing credit on some of those episodes, but those aren’t necessarily going to be good things for people to read, because they don’t know what you did on that versus someone else writing on that.

Al: Correct.

John: They may look at your work history and say, “It’s great that you worked on this show,” but they want to read something that’s original to you.

Miles: Hundred percent. That’s something that’s important. Usually, we like to read an original piece of work. In the old days, we also used to write spec episodes of shows that existed, which is a less-

John: Very uncommon now.

Miles: Yeah, but it was actually useful, because they could see if they could imitate your voice. That was something that I think has been lost. You can hire somebody who’s an amazing writer, but they have no aptitude to write our voice, because that’s what you want when you staff people is that they have that facility to be able to mimic you, which is an odd thing for some writers to do.

Megana: Jack says, “I’m Jack from England, and I’m a screenwriting student. I wanted to ask you about procrastination. I love writing. I’ve written several shorts and two pilots. I really want to take the next step and write a feature. I keep putting it off, and I know why. I’m terrified of it being terrible and discouraging me. Instead, I find myself procrastinating, and I’m stuck in a terrible place. Do you guys have any tips of squashing procrastination and finally getting around to starting that project?”

John: We’ve talked about procrastination a lot of times on the show. Episode 99, we have a big segment on it. I’m curious, the two of you together probably is a good barrier to procrastination, because you hold each other accountable.

Al: Exactly. We can also get together and kick around ideas, and it gets that process going, because a lot of times when people are like, “I have writer’s block,” you probably have story block, and you’re trying to work through things or you just hit something. I can see that getting in that cycle of like, oh, is it going to work or not? I think that is the nice thing about a partnership is you do… We always treated it like a job, so you do hold each other accountable.

Miles: If we get, as Al says, story blocked, we usually go get pie or doughnuts.

Al: Sugar’s great.

Miles: Sugar’s great. We just figure it out. The ability to talk it out with someone is often… How you get motivated is usually with a writers’ group or someone who can help you work through the story issues.

Also, often, it can mean that your story isn’t fully formed yet, so spending longer on the outline, making sure that works, so you haven’t written 40 pages of your script and realize the story’s not working, which that leads to depression and starting again. It’s really not launching too early. It’s always wanting to start too soon before you’ve actually… The heavy lifting is the story break, so making sure that you feel confident and you’ve pitched the story to people so you know the structure’s working. Once the structure works, then everything else should be much easier in terms of flowing.

John: Advice for Jack, what I hear Miles and Al saying is that having someone who you can work with is incredibly useful. If you don’t have a writing partner, having someone else who can be on your side or just hold you accountable to getting stuff done could be great to get you over the procrastination.

Jack’s also worried about, “The thing I write is going to be terrible,” and it’s going to be discouraging to him. Maybe try approaching it from the opposite way, like, “This is going to suck. This is going to be terrible. This is going to be awful, but I’m going to just do it anyway. It’s going to be bad. I’m going to learn from it.” Try to get yourself started that way, but don’t hold yourself to some impossibly high standard. Hold yourself to actually a pretty low standard [inaudible 00:54:58] to get the work done. You’ve already finished two shorts and two pilots. Great. You know you’re able to actually get stuff done. A feature’s a longer thing, but you can get a feature done.

Al: We were talking about this the other day. When we got Lethal Weapon 4, and it was our first big thing, and then you’re like, “Oh shit, how are we going to write this?”

Miles: You’re overwhelmed and intimidated.

Al: Overwhelmed and intimidated, because movies you loved in college and things like that.

Miles: Mimi Leder had written an article actually in Written By, which is the Writers Guild magazine, about this movie Deep Impact and how she got through that. She got through it one scene at a time. It’s really not thinking about the big picture. It’s thinking about every scene is a building block to something. Really, what got us through that script was just focusing on the scene where it was ahead of us and just writing that. We just accumulated scenes.

Al: It got you past the intimidation of the-

Miles: You just needed to get through a page and a half of a scene, and then you’re fine.

Megana: I really like that distinction of story block. Is that something that you’re encountering when you’re going from outline to scriptwriting phase?

Al: Our outlines are pretty detailed. When we look at the paragraphs for the scenes, sometimes there’s dialog in them. In some ways it’s kind of a little like a first draft, because you’re trying to work through… We say if it’s a roadmap, it’s giving you all the interstates, so that when you sit down to write, it’s like, “Oh, I can go off to this back road and try this.” It actually frees you up to I think be more creative when you’re actually writing the scenes and not be worried about the math and the architecture, and just being able to focus on writing the scene and knowing it works, so if all else fails, you can go back to this. It does give you opportunities.

Megana: You’re figuring out more of that before you even start the outlines.

Miles: Absolutely. That’s the key element, that you don’t start before you’re ready. It’s knowing when you’re ready. We’ll spend weeks, months, years sometimes working on just the architecture before we launch in, because you don’t want to launch in and realize, oh, that’s where the story block happens.

Al: That’s a lot of what you’re working through in the writers’ room. This was interesting, because we love Zoom rooms, and it’s great when you got the big picture stuff, but then sometimes when you’re writing and you’re getting into the more granular pieces… We’ve said this a couple of times, “I wish we’d all just get in a whiteboard, and we would totally figure this out in a couple hours.” I think there’s that element of it as well.

John: The two of you, what is your process for that early stage stuff? Are you guys index carders? Are you whiteboarders? Do you have a thing you go to, or is it just conversation and notes?

Miles: A lot of conversations at cafes. We go to the [inaudible 00:57:37] and sit upstairs and eats doughnuts, just sit there for hours talking through the store.

Al: We’re like, “Let’s write this down before we forget.” It’s a lot of that. Again, we’ve been writing together for nearly 30 years. I always know if we get together, whatever kind of problem or block we’re having, we will ultimately figure it out. Might not figure it out today. Might be two days from now. It takes a lot of talking through it.

John: Either you’ll solve the problem or you’ll realize that you’re trying to answer the wrong questions and figure out something different.

Al: Exactly right. You’ll, exactly, do something different.

Miles: It is just hours of talking.

Al: Even in the writers’ rooms, like we said, we really want the outlines. Everybody knows what it is. The writer knows what the scene’s about. It’s not just the logistics of the scene. It’s what’s the scene about.

John: Let’s talk through the last stage of what the scene’s about is really that tone meeting discussion. The script’s been written. It’s there. Everyone can agree on what the words are that are going to be said. The actual approach to how you’re going to shoot the scene and how you’re going to edit the scene, that last conversation is really important too. Can you just talk us through, working with Tim or working with any of your other directors, what is the tone discussion going into a given scene or a given day’s work?

Al: What’s interesting is what we… Tim is different than obviously the directors, because what we would do with him… We worked this out, because he’s obviously never had showrunners before. We wanted to respect his process but be available, because it’s keeping a bigger story in your head. What we would do is, we would meet with him in the trailer in the morning and go through all the scenes. He would ask any questions he had. he would then say, “Are there certain things you want to make sure that I hit?”

Miles: That’s right.

Al: He was also like, “You guys are keeping the big mystery, and so I want to make sure I’m getting all the… ” We’d say, “This is important. That’s important.”

Miles: He was amazingly collaborative in all stages, except when he was directing, when he got into his whole directing… He was different in terms of he got into…

John: I knew that from Big Fish. I was really curious what that was going to be like on the set, because on Big Fish, it’s like this garage door goes down in front of him.

Miles: Exactly.

John: He doesn’t want to have that conversation.

Al: There were a few days of a pre-shoot so the crew could get their feet. We realized on the first day, we’re like, “We gotta figure out… ” It was a little awkward. We went to him and said, “Look, we want to figure out a system so that we’re respectful of you.” He was like, “I’m glad you guys talked.” He said, “Let’s do it this way.” In the old days, we would just have one big, long tone meeting with the director, and they’d go off and shoot. Then what we started doing, I think it was on Shannara, is we would meet with the director on the weekends, because it’s a block. It’s actually two episodes you’re shooting.

Miles: There’s a long-

Al: It’s a long-

Miles: It’s like 35 days.

Al: To keep in your head. We’d go and meet with him and just go through the week’s work when it was a Sunday afternoon and there was no meter running.

Miles: They’ve now worked with the actors. Also, we’d sit there and say, “These are the actors’ strengths and weaknesses. This is the crew’s strengths and weaknesses,” just so they have a full picture of what we’re doing. Then we also talk about how we want the scenes shot. We usually have a specific way we want them shot and understanding the visual effects element or whatever it is. It’s making sure that’s communicated so it has a consistence. It’s all about consistency, so every episode feels like it’s the same vision rather than five different directors. That’s always the goal.

Each thing you do, I’m sure John would agree, you learn something new about the process. You never get there. It’s always like, “Oh my gosh.” This one was all about the camera operators, how important they were. It’s always a fascinating learning experience.

John: The most difficult people, the most dangerous people you’re going to meet in this business are the ones who’ve had some success and will never change from the way they’ve always classically done things. Those are the situations where you cannot convince them otherwise. The ship can be sinking, and they’re going to stick to their plan, because that’s what’s always worked for them.

Al: Exactly right. It’s so true. The other thing too, on this one specifically, is the other directors got all of the dailies. They got to watch all of Tim’s dailies, just to see his process.

Miles: [Crosstalk 01:01:59] to match the style.

Al: To match the style.

John: Great. You have an ongoing crew that’s going to help with everything else, but still, you want to make sure they’re making the same choice about how you’re coming into scenes.

Al: Exactly.

John: It’s not just about lenses. It’s really what the approach is.

Miles: Exactly.

John: Great. It’s time for our One Cool Things. Do you guys have things to recommend to our listeners?

Al: My One Cool Thing, because I have a one-track mind, I’m reading a book. It’s called The Way They Were, which is about the making of the movie The Way We Were. It is a fascinating look at the studio process in the ’70s. That movie is a total studio movie. It’s not an auteur movie.

Miles: Say what the movie is.

Al: The Way We Were.

John: The Way We Were.

Al: The Way We Were.

John: The Redford, Streisand movie.

Al: Redford, Streisand, Sydney Pollack.

John: I remember that there was a poster of that in our Stark classroom.

Al: Yes, there was, because Ray Stark, who was the benefactor, it was his movie. I always forget Art Murphy, who was the first head of the Stark Program, who used to review movies for Variety. He met Ray Stark when he wrote a review of The Way We Were, which he didn’t like. His first line of the review was, “Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.” Anyway, it’s a fascinating book just looking at an actual studio movie getting made. It was rewritten by every top screenwriter in town in the ’70s. You had Sydney Pollack as the director, who was a classic studio prestige movie director. It’s a great read, because everybody talks.

John: The nice thing about a movie with that much time going past, no one has an ax to grind.

Al: Exactly.

Miles: Mine’s a little more practical, which is I always use a Moleskine notebook, which is lined, for just jotting down lines or observations or lists, just so it’s actually not just a random thing, so it feels special. I always keep it with me. I think it’s a really good writer’s tool, that you actually physically write stuff, not just note it down on your iPad or iPhone, so it really feels like you’re writing. I think that’s something that’s very useful and I’ve really come to love as a tool.

John: Let’s get very Moleskine-specific here. What you’re talking about is about six inches wide, eight inches tall?

Miles: Yeah. It’s the hardback small book.

Al: It feels like it’s a book.

John: Are you a both sides of the page or one side of the page?

Miles: I’m both sides.

John: You’re both sides of the page. Do you date the pages?

Miles: I don’t.

John: It’s just continuous going through it all. When you’re done with the notebook, what do you do with it?

Miles: I keep them in a stack.

John: Are they labeled on the spine, or how do you find them?

Miles: No. I got five of them. They’re all full.

Al: It’s like a serial killer book.

Miles: Each one’s a horrible memory of a different production. They’re sitting there like scars. They’re incredibly useful. I think that’s a really valuable tool, just the physicality of writing what you need to do. That’s my One Cool Thing.

John: Absolutely. I use the notebooks for actually taking notes, not just my to-do list kind of stuff, but for taking notes. I’ll find it’s really useful in meetings just to note who said a thing, and a lot with WGA stuff, who made a point, and so you can go back to it and remember that person was actually a smart person. I have found that being able to go back through and actually find my old note has been really, really useful.

Miles: I always do that with casting, when I’m looking at Zoom stuff. I can write all the people down, because sometimes you don’t get the person you want. Just having that physical book rather than just a piece of paper, you can go back to refer to. Even years later you can go back and say, “I like that kid,” or, “I like that actor. What was their name?” You’ve starred that person. It’s really a great tool that’s been lost. I think that’s something that’s great.

John: Yeah, because the casting sheets we always used to get were two or three sheets of paper stapled together. You don’t hold onto that. You might take little notes on it, but you’re not going to hold onto it for a while.

Miles: The person you like is the one you pick. There could be three other people that are actually pretty good. Also, you don’t necessarily get the first person you want. People can evolve. It’s really I think useful.

John: I remember Josh Holloway, who became Sawyer on Lost, came in for a pilot of mine. He was supposed to be playing this Alaska State Trooper. He’s the least Alaskan person you’re ever going to meet. I think I said to him in the room, “You’re not right for this, but you’re fantastic. You’re absolutely going to kill it.” I was right. Those are the kind of people you star and you remember and you keep-

Miles: Who did we have? Rachel McAdams came to see us.

Al: Rachel McAdams.

John: Wow.

Miles: For Lois Lane.

Al: Lois Lane. This was in Season 3 of Smallville. We didn’t get Lois until Season 4. We met with her, and she had just done a pilot for ABC.

Miles: She hadn’t got it, remember?

Al: Nancy Drew. Was it Nancy Drew?

Miles: She was up for Nancy Drew and she hadn’t got it. We said, “You know what? That’s the best thing that’s ever happened to you, because you’re going to be a movie star. Don’t worry about it.”

Al: You said, “This has been a great meeting. A year from now, you will not be here.”

John: I’m sure you’ve had this experience where the network of the studio will have an actor they absolutely love, and they’ll send them to you, and you’re like, “I don’t understand what you see in this person.”

Al: A lot.

Miles: A lot.

Al: We got a lot of that from The WB.

Miles: We’ve put people in the show as well. I won’t mention names. It’s like, “Oh my goodness, what were we thinking?” We want to play ball. Whatever happens happens. We don’t really now take that pressure, do we?

Al: No. Also, shows are different. Obviously, ’22, you had a lot of guest stars. You had a lot of those, more opportunities.

John: We’ve all been there. My One Cool Thing is incredibly self-serving. For Scriptnotes, we have our Premium subscriptions where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record. People can sign up for that scriptnotes.net. Also, scriptnotes.net, you can click on the Gifts tab, and you can buy a $29 gift pass for Scriptnotes Premium for six months or $49 for a year. You might want to give that as a gift.

Actually, I think the more clever thing to do, as many of our listeners have done, is… You know how you always have that parent or that grandparent that’s like, “I want to get you something for Christmas. I don’t know what to get you,” and you’re like, “I have no idea what to get me.” Ask them to get you a Scriptnotes Premium subscription, because you’ll actually learn something about screenwriting. They’ll feel happy that they got you something that’s going to advance your career. You’ll be happy because you’ll get to hear all the Bonus Segments and Megana laughing at the things we’re saying in the background. If you would like a gift subscription to Scriptnotes or just general Scriptnotes Premium, scriptnotes.net, and there’s a Gifts tab at the top. Al and Miles, thank you so much for a fun show.

Miles: Thank you.

Al: Thank you. It was great.

Miles: Great.

John: It was really great. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Adam Locke Norton. 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, Craig is no longer on Twitter, I’m still @johnaugust for the moment. Are you guys on Twitter or any of the social medias?

Al: Not on Twitter, no, on Instagram.

John: We’re going to probably take this out of the outline, because no one’s on Twitter anymore. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the 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. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back-episodes, the Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on film school. Al and Miles, thank you so much.

Al: Thank you.

Miles: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: The three of us met in film school. I applied to the Stark Program coming from Iowa. I knew nothing about the film industry. I knew what I’d read in Premiere magazine, and that was it.

Miles: Premiere magazine.

John: I miss Premiere magazines.

Miles: I know.

Al: Me too.

John: Oh my god, it was so good. We all showed up here. We knew nothing, and we came. This was an era before the internet. One of the reasons why I loved USC film school was it had this giant script library. I remember checking out scripts in the library and learning so much. [inaudible 01:09:55] had her own script library. You could check out two a week. It was an invaluable resource. Now that’s just the internet. Any script you ever want to read, it’s there.

Let’s think about recommendations for people who are thinking about film school, pros and cons, who should, who should not be thinking about it. Would the three of us go to film school in 2022 if we were similarly situated? Would you, Al?

Al: I probably would. We all have now college-age or almost college-age kids. I don’t think I’d go to film school undergrad.

John: I wouldn’t either.

Al: I think that’s kind of a waste. I think that was great about our program was it was 25 students. They were all type-A personalities. It was like a reality show before reality shows. I think a lot of these schools cater to the graduate students. I certainly felt like we got all of the information, equipment, everything we needed. It did open doors. We all had internships. We were able to really learn the business. I only wanted to go to film school in Los Angeles. I only applied to USC and I applied to UCLA, both to the producers’ programs, and got into USC, thank god. That really was the entrée in, because we were all coming up together. None of us knew anybody.

Miles: Or anything.

Al: Or anything, because like you said, it was pre-internet. I would still do it again.

John: Miles, would you do it again in 2022?

Miles: I would a hundred percent do it again. I would be absolutely nowhere without that experience at film school in terms of a career. It was really what launched us totally, utterly. We still have friends who employ us every now and again from that experience.

For me, it was literally a kid in the UK, “How do I get to Hollywood?” because I had no interest in making films in the UK, because that sensibility was not mine. It was a way to come to America, which was a huge deal as an international student. That was great. I always loved Hollywood movies, so being in LA, that to me was like… It makes sense to come to LA, because that really is still the center of this business. I know there are great film schools all over America and all over the world. I always wanted to make Hollywood movies and be here, so for me it made total sense.

Then I also didn’t know what exactly I wanted to do within the business. Our program in particular was like a grab bag of writing, directing, producing, all of it. I think looking back now, I would like to have directed a lot more. Would I like to have gone to a directors’ program? Probably. That’s what I should’ve done. I’m not complaining about my writing career. It’s an interesting thing.

What I didn’t realize before I came to film school and what I learned very quickly at film school was writing is the essential element of this business. Without a script, without an idea that is executed well, there’s nothing. Writers really are kings. I think that’s amazing that we’re still so undervalued and underappreciated and our lives are hell most of the time. It’s still true. That’s still the lesson I think I learned, which is a revelation when I came, because I always thought the director was everything. Oh my god.

You read the scripts, as John says, from the film library, and you see everything is in the script. You read a great script for everything. There it is, written down, interpreted and executed by the director, but it actually comes from the mind and imagination of the writer.

Al: It’s funny, I thought that was interesting. The Oscars I think a couple years ago put the page all the description and answered the question, which we all get, “Do you guys just write the dialog, or do the actors just make that up?” No, they do not.

Miles: Exactly. It’s, “What do you guys do?” It’s like, you work it all out.

John: Miles, would you go to undergrad for film school?

Miles: I wouldn’t, no.

John: I agree with you both. I don’t think undergrad film school makes a lot of sense. I think if someone who is an 18-year-old is super into films, great. Go get a liberal arts degree in something else that you also really enjoy. Makes film on the side. Do a bunch of stuff. That should be your complete hobby is making films and learning about films, but it doesn’t have to be your main focus of those four years. Maybe save some money in those first four years. Go someplace that’s not super expensive.

If you really want to go to film school, go to film school for grad school, because that is where you’re going to meet a group of people who are trying to enter into this business at the same time, because as much as I learned in my two years of Stark, it was my classmates.

Al: Totally.

John: 100%. It was you guys being successful and incredibly competitive at the start. It was all of the drama and all that stuff. It was really helpful.

Miles: Of course. Absolutely.

John: Of our 25 students, 12 or more are major players in the industry now, because we all rose up together. You guys read my stuff. I read your stuff. Finding a core group of people was essential. I could not have this career without it.

Miles: That’s right.

Al: Agreed.

Miles: It is always a class of 25. 12 of us have been very successful. I feel bad for the others, because it’s a big financial commitment. Nowadays, obviously, you can sit in a room and make amazing stuff on your computer. You have an iPhone, which is incredible. If you want to be a director, there’s no excuse. You can go make a movie tomorrow, five minutes or an hour. Whatever you want to do, you can… The technology is there, and it’s dirt cheap. That’s a difference from our period. You can put it online. It can go viral. It’s amazing what people do. The guy Wes Ball, who did Maze Runner, it’s all from his thing he did in his computer at home in his basement. It’s huge opportunity. I think film school is great in many ways, but that networking element for us was critical.

John: I want to circle back to something you said, Miles, because you said as a person coming from the UK. Our program that we went through is now mostly international students. If you are a person who wants to get to Los Angeles, who wants to get to America just to learn about doing stuff, getting into a college is a way to get yourself into the US. You wouldn’t have been able to get a work visa to come here and do stuff.

Miles: No, it’s impossible. It wasn’t my motivation for coming, but in terms of coming to Hollywood, it was like, “Oh my god.” I couldn’t believe I got in, for one thing. It was a dream come true to come here to the epicenter of the movie business. It was a big deal.

Megana: Would you choose to do a producing program again?

John: It was the right choice for me because I didn’t know anything about anything. I think I imagine myself as a 22-year-old in 2022 who has listened to Scriptnotes and knows that I want to be a writer, maybe I would’ve done that. I may have done a more true production program. I’m sometimes skeptical of the pure writing programs in that it’s a lot of theory and you may not actually get a lot out of it. The nice thing about the program we were in or a production program is that you’re around people who are making stuff and that you’re seeing, “Okay, from what I just wrote here, this is the scene that actually come out.” You get [inaudible 01:16:55] a lot more.

Al: Also, I think what the Stark Program was was incredibly practical. Very few of our classes were actually at USC. They were out at Sony. They were at lawyers’ offices. They were at different things. You were just immersed in it right away.

Miles: From what John said, a lot of writing programs are navel gazing, over-intellectualized. That’s great if you want to make arthouse movies, but if you want to make commercial Hollywood movies or TV shows, that’s not a great place to start. You’re always going to be resisting, like, “This is my personal story.” It’s like, “That’s great, but that’s not going to be a global sensation or it’s not going to travel. It’s a small movie.” I think for us, USC was about commercial, like Spielberg, George Lucas. That was the goal, wasn’t it?

Al: Yeah.

John: The other crucial thing people need to remember is that unlike law school or medical school, how you’re doing in your classes does not matter at all. I have no idea what grades I got. I’m sure I did great, but I don’t care.

Miles: Remember the documentary class?

John: Oh yeah. Classically, people who don’t know the stories, we had this documentary class. Mitchell Block I think was who was teaching it.

Miles: Exactly.

John: He was so great and so dedicated about how you make documentaries, really about how you raise money to make documentaries. I remember one night he was talking through about PBS grants and how you can get up to $6,000 from PBS for this kind of thing and talking about how you cobble it together. Net to me, our friend Jen, her cellphone goes off. You should not have your cellphone in a classroom. Her cellphone goes off. She runs out into the hall. She comes back, she says, “Al and Miles just sold their script for a million dollars.” Poor Mitchell Block then had to go back to saying how you could get $9,000 from this other little-

Miles: Remember he had a great thing about, “You can become your own church and get a grant.”

Al: That’s right.

Miles: It was like, what are you talking about?

Al: I know.

Miles: You can’t be serious. Oh my god.

Al: So funny.

John: The other thing which I would say was really helpful that I got out of Stark, which I would never have really learned otherwise, is that budgeting and scheduling class. It was a drag. I did not enjoy doing it. The fact I can actually read a budget and a schedule and understand what those choices are how to make them… I don’t ever want to do that again, but I can actually understand. I would’ve had a hard time learning how that all worked if I hadn’t had a class that really just walked me through the whole thing.

Miles: That gave us a global view of everything, didn’t it?

John: Yes.

Miles: In terms of the TV thing and the legal element, which is really useful in terms of contracts. It was really a great thing. I think the issue for many people though is just owning what you want to do. Sometimes you don’t know it. I want to be a writer is a hard thing for someone to say and admit, because people will think you’re… Like, “Really?” How do you prove that? It’s like I think declaring you want to be a director. Then you’ve gotta direct and do something, which you can do on an iPhone. If you want to be a writer, you’ve gotta write. It’s not talking about writing. You’ve actually gotta do it. I think that’s something that is difficult for people. I understand why it’s difficult, because it’s really a declaration of your life, a life choice. It’s hard.

John: Let’s think through some of the below-the-line skills as well. If you want to be an editor, should you go to film school, if you want to be a cinematographer? I’d say maybe. The pros of it is you’re going to be taught by people who actually have some theory behind stuff, which is great. You may make relationships with people who will actually make a lot of movies down the road too. That could be great. You could DP on their things while they’re in film school, and they keep you around. There are people who have been building whole careers out of that. Yet that’s still not the same kind of practical experience you’d get just working on a set. Being a PA might teach you more about what that all is than [crosstalk 01:20:37].

Miles: I agree. The best experience is practical. There’s also a wealth of production now. I think if I were in the UK right now, this is the dream period. There’s so much production in the UK. It’s like, why to go film school? You can work on a Marvel movie or a Star Wars show. It’s about persistence. It’s about the hustle. That’s a great lesson.

I love this lesson from film school. We had this really aggressive producing instructor. He was an old-school Hollywood. He drove this huge Mercedes. He came to his class and said, “I was just pulled over in Beverly Hills speeding to this class. It was the best lesson I’m going to teach you right now about producing, which is beg. When the cop pulled me over, I said, ‘I’m going to get out of this ticket. You know how I’m going to do it? Beg.’ That’s what Hollywood’s about. You beg until they say yes.”

Al: Is this Jack Brodsky?

Miles: Yeah, Jack. He said, “Guess what? I got no ticket. I bluffed my way out of it, and no ticket.” It’s like, oh my god, that is such the Hollywood hustle.

Al: It is true, yeah, because that’s the thing sometimes I think writers forget is that you are an entrepreneur. You do have to really generate your own material. Again, you can change the perception of you with one script. It’s always that. You can’t wait for people to hire you or put you on staff or rely on agents or managers. You really do have to do it yourself. Then the rest comes from that.

John: Great. Thanks.

Al: Thank you.

Miles: Thank you.

Links:

• Al Gough on Instagram
• Miles Millar on Twitter
• Wednesday on Netflix
• The Way They Were book about the movie The Way We Were
• Moleskine Notebooks
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• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John August on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Adam Locke Norton (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.