Scriptnotes, Episode 613: Entering the Post-Strike Era, Transcript

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 613 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, it’s time for a five-year checkup. We’ll open an email time capsule about the state of the industry and maybe just perhaps spend a lot of the episode talking about the WGA deal. And in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, dreams.

Craig: Dreams.

John: Not the aspirational kind, but those pictures in your mind while you sleep. We’ll talk about those. Hooray! But this is an episode with actual news, because-

Craig: What? Did something happen?

John: Something happened, Craig.

Craig: Huh?

John: I don’t know if you’ve been aware. I don’t know if you’ve checked the headlines.

Craig: No. What happened?

John: After 146 days on strike-

Craig: We were on strike? Oh, no.

John: Did you forget?

Craig: Oh my god.

John: Craig.

Craig: I am in so much trouble.

John: Oh, man. So much explaining to do.

Craig: Oh, no.

John: WGA reached a tentative agreement with the studios.

Craig: Woohoo!

John: The strike is over. We are back to work. We discussed this almost entirely over on the sidecast episodes, so this is our first main feed mention post-strike. For future historians, five years from now, this was the first episode that was recorded in the post-strike era. Now, Craig, because it’s usually just Drew and Megana and I talking over in sidecasts, and because I was on the Negotiating Committee, you and I really have not talked about much of this stuff at all. This is my first chance to ask you, what do you think? What’s your impressions?

Craig: I am thrilled. Look, I’m thrilled that the strike is over. Of course, when strikes end, obviously, a lot of pain ends for a lot of people, so that’s important. But there are a couple of ways strikes end. Either end in achievement or end in not so much achievement. This was a whole lot of achievement. You saw something that I wrote 10 weeks ago on Threads, the poorly attended Threads.

John: Oh, remember Threads?

Craig: What I wrote was, “The AMPTP,” this is 10 weeks ago, “has lost already. They’re in denial, and they’re paranoid about giving in, but none of that changes the facts.” What I said was, basically, they were going to lose, because they had already lost, and it would behoove them and save them quite a bit of money and save everybody a lot of pain if they just could just lose quickly, as opposed to slowly, because the outcome could not be anything other than, with the exception of adjustments of quantity, the WGA had to secure everything in principle that it was asking for. It was the only possible outcome, and that is exactly what happened, although that is not to diminish how hard it was for you guys, for the leadership, and for the membership to stick to it.

I don’t think I had a single conversation with anybody where it felt like people felt we had a choice. Everybody just kind of felt, “This is it. Either we get it or what’s the point of any of this?” We got it. Jeez, I wish they had just… It’s funny. I look at this deal, and right after I’m, “Yay,” I go, what is it about any of this that was hard to give? It’s just mind-blowing to me. Would love to just run through-

John: Let’s run through it, because you and I have never really done this. You can take the lead here. I can jump in when I have clarifications or some color to put on stuff.

Craig: Perfect.

John: I’m mostly curious to hear your take on this.

Craig: First up, the standard minimum bumps, those are more than they typically are, but those were negotiated by the DGA. This is where pattern bargaining is just a rigid fact of life. Those were always going to be what those were always going to be, and it will forever be so. But just as important to note that when we were done negotiating and striking, we got a lot of stuff that was just simply different. Not different from what they had, but different as in they don’t have it at all and we got it. Those minimum bumps, not surprising to me at all, and unquestionable, essentially. Anybody that says that you guys should’ve gotten more just doesn’t understand how the world works.

John: Something people should understand is that those top line minimum bumps is basically anything in the contract that doesn’t say it changes by a different percentage all increases by that percentage. If it doesn’t say otherwise, everything rose by 5% in that first year.

Now, there’s a lot of stuff that’s new in the contract that has its own bumps. It’s important to note those things, because there’s a whole new Writer-Producer tier, which is 9% above what the Story Editor rate was. That’s a big change. Things increased overall more than just the minimums, but those minimums are the top thing you see.

Craig: One other thing that I think it’s important for people to understand about those minimums is that they’re cumulative. If you have a 4% raise in year two – I can’t remember the exact details – and then year three it’s maybe 5%, that 5% applies to the already 4% bumped-up number. So it is cumulative. It compounds. There are quite a few people who, I remember when the DGA deal came out, were like, “That doesn’t even match inflation.” It does, I think.

But there were many other places where we needed to improve things, and we did, so let’s get into those. We made made-for-streaming movies move much closer to the theatrical residual model than ever before. That’s a great improvement.

John: Absolutely. There aren’t a lot of these movies, honestly. Most of the stuff that’s being made for streamers is done under theatrical terms anyway. We wanted to make sure that there wasn’t any incentive to start making them under streaming contracts rather than under theatrical contracts.

Craig: A good loophole to be closed and a good bump for people that were operating under that, let’s call it a loophole. Oh my god, a second step for writers in theatrical who are earning double or less than double scale. Anything above double scale, no. But if you are earning under twice scale, you get a guaranteed second step. This is a thing that I proposed on the Negotiating Committee in 2004. It took 19 years. You guys got it done. Can’t thank you enough. That is a huge, huge win for theatrical writers.

You may say, is it really going to put that much more money in their pockets? In the short term, probably not. But what it does is reintroduces the business to the value of the second step. We’ve talked about it on the podcast quite a bit. It’s just a revision to a broken system, and it gives theatrical writers a chance to learn how to do their jobs without feeling like they’re always one draft away from being fired.

John: It’s also a way to push back against the scourge of free work. If you know that you have that second step coming, you can say to the producers and executives and everyone else pressing you for, oh, if you could just fix this thing and this thing and this thing, “You know what, guys? I have that whole extra rewrite guaranteed. Let me do it then.”

Craig: Correct. It also removes the fear factor from producers who feel like they only get one chance to submit this thing to the studio. Now they have two. It helps. It helps everybody. It’s particularly helpful for the studios, because they don’t have to worry about producers just going crazy for seven months. Weekly pay in theatrical, a nudge in a positive direction, although I do think the two steps will be more impactful overall. But good to see. Good to see.

John: Where we got to in this was, rather than weekly pay, we have accelerated pay for those same writers who are 200% of scale or less. After nine weeks, they invoice, they get paid initial 25%. After nine weeks, they’ve been paid out 75%. Does it solve the problem? No. But it puts more money in their pockets sooner. Talking to writers in this situation, cashflow is really a huge problem. They were running out of money. This gets them more money quicker.

Craig: I misspoke when I said weekly pay. The typical method was, “We’re going to divide your amount of money in half. You get half up front. You get half when you turn a thing in.” The problem is the turn the thing in. Producers were delaying that endlessly. This not only gets you half of the half that you would normally get at the end sooner. It also alerts the studios to the fact that a bunch of time has gone by and they haven’t gotten a script, so they might start asking for it, which is good. We want that.

John: Craig, this is something I’ve wanted to say on the podcast for a while, so this is a little sidebar here. I do think it’s best practices for when you are starting a theatrical project. When you get that first commencement check, email the whole team and say, “Hey folks, I just got commenced on this. I’m so excited. Today I’m starting a 12-week contract per my deal. I anticipate handing in the script on this date.” Just making sure everyone actually understands what the timelines are here and just putting them on notice that this is a 12-week deal, this is not meant to be the next eight months of my life, can just be helpful, just be good framing here. After nine weeks, for writers who qualify for this, it’s a reminder for yourself, oh, that’s right, I actually have to stupidly invoice at nine weeks to get paid that 25%.

Craig: Certainly, our lawyers are all aware of this now. I think if you do say something like what you just suggested, John, you have to brace yourself for a very angry phone call from the producer, who knows exactly what you’re up to. There is that, just to be aware of.

But certainly, it’s enormously helpful to note that the trigger payment that comes earlier, it’s an internal alarm that can go off at the studio, like, “Why have nine weeks gone by, and we haven’t seen a thing?” or, “How are you doing? Where are you at?”

John: Exactly.

Craig: We do have escalated minimums for higher-level Writer-Producer tiers. That’s what you just described earlier. It’s important because it basically rebuilds the ladder in television. Basically, there used to be a ladder. You would start as a staff writer. You get this minimum. Then as you went up, you got more. At least from the writing point of view, it all flattened out to minimums for everybody, and there was no more ladder. It was just a floor. The ladder has been restored.

Some people may say, “How does this help me if I am a new writer?” There’s a ladder. You can climb it now. It means there’s a chance for you to earn more as you progress in your career. Yes, in the short term, it benefits the people above you. In the long term, assuming that things go well for you, it benefits you. That’s important.

John: It also ties into the fact that now you’re required to have a certain number of those writer-producers at the higher pay tier, are required for staffing. It pulls people up that system. When everyone was being paid the same, it didn’t matter who you were hiring. You saw people just stuck and stagnating.

Craig: Exactly. Let’s talk about mini rooms, which I think quite rightly took it in the shorts, as they should. I like the phrase that the Guild’s been using, which is development rooms or pre-greenlights rooms. It helps, because mini room is actually a terrible word for what they are.

What’s happened? We as a Guild have secured more pay for a longer guaranteed time if writers are working in these pre-greenlight development rooms. In short, these rooms have gotten more expensive and less attractive to the companies, which is good, because from a creative point of view and from a quality of life point of view and from a career point of view, I can detect nothing positive about them at all.

John: Mini rooms, or development rooms, came to be as an alternative to pilots. Once upon a time we made pilots, and then we shot the pilots, and we saw what the show was. Increasingly, streamers decided, oh, no, we are just going to get a bunch of scripts and they’ll make a decision based on that. They didn’t have to pay any premium to make those things. Now they do, and so it may cause them to reevaluate how they are choosing to develop their shows and whether they might shoot more pilots or how they are going to proceed.

Craig: Correct. The Guild got script fees for staff writers, or any writer in television, on top of the weekly amount they’re paid. That is excellent. To borrow a D and D term, it stacks nicely with the new streaming residual formula, because there are a lot of things that are tied directly to credit, like residuals. It’s good to see that if you write a script, that is an additional amount of money on top of the amount that you were already getting paid. It means that you don’t essentially write a script for free, I guess, if they had to pay you anyway. It was good to see.

John: It was great to see. That has been an issue, like a guaranteed second step for feature writers, that’s always been there. It’s always been like, “It’s absurd that we can’t get this.” This time we got it.

Craig: We got it. Let’s talk about minimum staffing, which was something of a controversial thing. For starters, there is a carve-out for writers who like to go it alone. Hooray. Now, I have been that writer. I am not currently that writer on The Last of Us, because I do work with Neil Druckmann, and for Season 2, also Halley Gross. I was actually quite thrilled to see that. Let’s talk about the value here. Minimum staff of, to start with, three Writer-Producer tier people. Now, I have a question for you. What level does that include?

John: Co-producer and above.

Craig: Okay, so it is the new, higher-paid level.

John: Exactly.

Craig: Basically, the first three people that you have to make sure you have, if you are not writing everything by yourself, are three writers, including the showrunner, if they so choose, at that higher level. Beyond that, depending on how many episodes you are writing, you may then also need to hire additional writers who can be at that higher level or not.

John: Yeah, and would likely be not at that level, just in terms of how budgets and things work out.

Craig: That’s right.

John: It’s of course important to stress that these are minimums. One of the goals in any contract is to make sure that you’re not incentivizing the minimums to become the maximums. We are very mindful of that in how we’re putting these together. Staff writers and story editors are less expensive now than writer-producer level writers, and so this is a good budgetary reason to make sure you’re including them in your show.

Craig: This was going to happen. I think any time you look at what a guild asks for, or at least in this circumstance, if there was a quantity, we of course weren’t going to ask for our bottom line quantity, so there’s room to give there. But the existence of this was going to happen. I got asked about this all the time. I know Mike White got asked about it all the time. Part of me wishes that we could’ve just incorporated the carve-out from the start. I think it would’ve eliminated a lot of internal strife and a lot of carping about certain writers, as if, for instance, Mike White was doing something wrong and not just writing two great seasons of a TV show in the way that he likes to write.

Given that part of the argument about this was, “99% of shows use rooms anyway, so we really have to address their needs,” okay, then, so why obsess over rooms for that last 1% of shows? In all negotiations, you have to have things to give away. I don’t know, and I don’t need to know, if this was part of the calculation that maybe, okay, we’ll toss that back into the pile to get what we need.

But also, I can say, people ask me, “What do you think about it?” What I think about it is I’m one member of a union with over 10,000 members, and one thing became incredibly clear from the jump. This was an extremely popular demand. Our union on the whole wanted this. They had thought about it. They had considered. They weren’t bamboozled. They looked at it. They examined it. They said, “We want this.” Like any union member, I think it’s important to say, “Hey, you know what? I benefit from the union in all sorts of ways. I’m not going to necessarily benefit from every way.” My answer to the question, “What do you think about it?” is I’m glad the union got what the membership wanted, because to me, it seemed like any notion that we weren’t was insane. We were going to get this. And we got it.

John: One of my great frustrations in the discourse around minimum staffing, it’s like, “No other union tells people how many union members they have to hire.” I’m like, no, every union does that. That’s what unions do. You don’t get to choose whether you want assistant directors on your show. There are ADs. That just is a thing that happens. It was not this revolutionary seizing of the means of production that some people were portraying it as.

Craig: No. It was a response to the fact that there had been a system where 99% of shows had rooms. Those rooms were full of the amount of writers the showrunner felt they needed. Then the companies started to screw around. This is what happens. This is the eff around and find out moment.

John: I was going to say. Lindsay Dougherty.

Craig: They found out. Weekly minimums in post, we didn’t get it. I do not consider this a failure, because I don’t understand how we can get that, because I don’t think we’ve solved the wording problem yet. Obviously, I was not in the room with you guys, and I did not dig into all this. I understand the problem. The problem is, we want to ensure that writers, other than the showrunner, are going to be included, for instance, in editing, so that we can train them and they can prepare and they can learn, so that we have showrunners down the line.

But there is a wording problem, because no matter how many time the Guild says editing is writing, it’s not. We have a contract. The contract defines what writing is. There is a jurisdiction. I understand that we’re reserving legal rights. I don’t think that’s going to pan out. I think we need to figure out another way to solve it. The good news is, okay, no harm in trying. No harm, no foul. It helps define the path that doesn’t work. We’re going to have to figure out a path that does, because I think it’s important.

John: Just speaking up for some of the writers on the Negotiating Committee, some of other showrunners on the Negotiating Committee, who felt strongly that they were not being paid as writers during post. They were being forced down below Guild minimums for that time in post. You could say that’s a failure on their reps for not negotiating a proper payment for that time they were spending in post. Also, they literally had Final Draft open and were writing new scenes and new moments and new dialogue in those times, and that’s clearly writing. There is writing that happens during the post-production process, and that’s what they’re arguing. That’s why there’s ongoing arbitration over this. It will continue to be figured out.

Craig: Little dangerous. Yes, we do occasionally have to write things in post, and that is writing. If we argue that that’s the basis for this, I’m sure the companies will respond with, “Great. Let us know if you’re writing, and we will work up a weekly deal for you. That will be a minimum writing deal, and only for the time you’re writing. Let’s see what you write.” It’s tricky. This is one of the downsides of having writers who are also management. This is a tricky area. It’s not going to be an easy solve.

John: I agree.

Craig: But at the very least, we understand there is a problem. Now we’ve just got to figure out a different way to get there. I have faith.

John: I have faith.

Craig: Foreign streaming residuals. Question for you, John, was that reflective of the DGA deal? Either way, it was positive. I just didn’t know if this was something that was unique to us or we were inheriting from the DGA.

John: This was inherited from the DGA. Like everything, our asks were larger, and this is where we ended up.

Craig: That makes sense. Viewership-based streaming. This one was the holy grail here. It I’m sure at times felt somewhat insurmountable, because it was wrapped up in this other problem. The problem wasn’t that they were greedy and cheap, although they often are. The problem was they were greedy, cheap, and did not want to share the data required to actually be able to calculate this stuff.

John: Our residuals classically are based on reuse, where you can just see that reuse, like, oh, it aired on TBS, and therefore you’re getting residual payment, or based on units, and we had ways of auditing the number of DVDs or videotapes sold. Those are physical things we can track. Reuse that’s based on this is an incredibly popular show on your streaming service is a new metric for us, is a new thing we’ve never been able to study before.

Craig: Correct. What we were asking for was, since just basic reuse seems very difficult to define here, the moral argument was, guys, if a show is watched by a billion people, how is the writer of that show getting 12 cents in residuals? It doesn’t make sense. It’s not correct. We have to fix it. So where you guys landed I think is a decent start. It’s going to be fascinating to see how it goes.

There are bonuses now tied to viewership. They kick in when a show hits viewership that is equivalent to 20% of the domestic subscriber base. If there are 10 million people in the United States who subscribe to a platform, then we’re talking about 2 million. You have to get 2 million views within the first 90 days cumulative to then trigger the bonus scheme. This goes along hand in hand with a very obviously necessary data-sharing plan. The data itself will stay somewhat confidential with the Guild. The Guild will be able to present an aggregate of that to the membership, not necessarily a, “This many people watch Apple. This many people watch Amazon.”

The big question over the next three years is how many shows qualify. If a lot qualify, then we’re in good shape. If seven qualify, we’re going to need to bargain that threshold down. That’s how it’s going to be. That is a negotiation topic. What happened here was the invention of an entirely new payment plan.

This is something that is as close to being conjured out of thin air as you can get in a negotiation like this. Certainly, the DGA didn’t get this at all. To me, this was the most important and probably the most hard-fought victory that you guys had to get to. It’s a great beginning.

John: Thank you. I agree with you. It’s a first step, because we won’t know… We were told in the room, some staff, what roughly percentage of shows on their services should hit that. The way I like to think about it is that if the service is bragging, like, “This is the top show on our service in America,” it should probably be kicking off a payment here. If something is genuinely a hit on that show, and they’re bragging that it’s a hit, there probably needs to be a payment associated with that. I think we will get there. I think this will be that first step, this next two years and seven months before we’re back negotiating contract again. We’ll get some actual dollars out of this, but it’s that data transparency, our ability to actually look and see what other shows are doing that will tell us where we need to go next.

Craig: Correct. The battlefront will be on the threshold. That’s where we’ll live. We’ll see how we do. You can’t have that battle if it doesn’t exist, and it now exists, so that’s huge.

Residuals for ad-supported streaming. Not only is that great to see, that one was one of those things where I’m like, why are they not just giving… Just unreal that they didn’t just give that, and they had to fight about it. Anyway.

John: AVOD services, FAST services, I think we all recognize it’s a future growth area. There will some shows that are made specifically for those services. They’re not there yet, but we want to make sure that we have protections and residuals for those shows as they start to come up.

Craig: Health care bumps. Fairly typical when we need these things, usually, we get punished. You say, hey, look, we need you to add a little bit more into the amount you contribute per writer and per this much of earnings into health care. “Okay, we’ll do that, but instead of giving you the 3% minimum bump across the board, it’s going to be 2.5%.” We got all of it. We got the bigger bumps, and we got an increase in the health care bump, and wonderful to see also, an extension of one quarter of eligibility, one quarter of a year, to reflect the time that was lost to the strike. That’s a big deal. That is an example of a lesson learned from the last strike, where our staff honestly just miffed it. They thought that was just how it would work, and told the membership as much in leading up to the strike vote, and then later went, “Oh, actually, no.” Everybody was well aware that this was an issue going in.

This is one of those areas where I got to actually tip my hat to the AMPTP. I’m not saying that they were not jerks to not offer it immediately. But it does strike me that when it comes to these issues, they at least are less Scroogey perhaps than in some of these other areas. It was good to see that.

Huge, huge win here for writing teams. For as long as I’ve been in this union, for as long as you’ve been in this union, teams have been penalized, essentially. They had a different deal for how much money they could receive health care contributions for, and now, finally, at long last, we have won what is only fair, which is that even if you write with somebody else as a team, you are treated individually for the purposes of qualifying for pension and health care. It’s unreal that we have been living with this for so long, but it has been fixed. Thank god.

John: The way to think about it is these are two human beings who are writing as a team, but they’re also two human beings, and each of them needs pension, each of them needs health care. You and I both know so many partners who have struggled with this. In some cases, especially if they’re married partners, they would do tricks to put all the pension contributions under one person’s name so they could do spouse minimums. It was insane.

Craig: It was crazy.

John: To finally close this is such a welcome relief.

Craig: Yeah, really brutal and a huge relief. AI obviously, media-friendly topic. It was solved I think exactly as it should’ve been, to the extent that anybody can say that AI has been solved. The nightmare is still emerging. Basically, AI-generated stuff is not literary material. Writers cannot be required to write AI. Writers cannot be required to incorporate AI. They don’t have to adapt to AI. AI is not eligible for credit.

The one area that we’ve punted to the courts – it makes sense that we’ve punted it to the courts – is basically scraping. The companies are reserving the right to feed all the scripts that they own, that we wrote, into an AI to see if they can help make that AI better. It’s going to be a tough case for us to win in a court, because we’re basically arguing that they can’t scrape their own copyrighted material, because they own the copyright. The fact is, we don’t know where any of this is going. It was going to be nearly impossible to get them to not do that. I think getting all these other concessions was really important. It is a markedly stronger set of language than the language the DGA secured.

John: I was obviously very involved in the AI frontier. I say there’s really two buckets of gains you can be thinking about here. First off is the writer’s daily working life. Those are issues like, AI-generated material is not literary material, source material, or sonic material. That makes it so it’s not your problem, that you cannot be forced to use AI tools, that if something is being generated by AI and then handed to you, they have to tell you that. They have to disclose that to you. Those are all protections for you and me today.

The other thing we’re wrestling with is what happens to the huge trove of material that we have written for the studios, that they control copyright on, that they could use to train their models? It’s true, they do control copyright, but we also hold back certain rights. As you know, Craig, we have separated rights on material that govern reuse and remakes and other things, so that the mutual agreement, neither side is giving up their ability to assert that they have controls over this. We’ll see where it goes and whether it’s something that happens in the courts in the next couple years. We’ll see.

One thing I think it’s important for everyone to remember is that the companies that are actually really doing AI, Microsoft, Facebook, Open AI, they are not parties to this contract at all. Whatever we did in this MBA does not affect them directly. In many cases, writers and the studios are aligned in our ability to say you cannot do these things, you other companies. It’s going to be a really live and active issues. In some cases, we’ll be allied with the studios. In some cases, we’ll be fighting the studios. But this contract does not give up any of our rights to do so.

Craig: Yeah, I think you hit on it, that the area where this can get worked out is in separated rights. Those are negotiated. We’ll have more success there than we will in a court, but we’ll see how it goes. The important thing was not only did we get about the strongest language I think we could’ve expected to get, but we also then set up SAG for their negotiation. Because I’m not on a negotiating committee, I’m just going to go ahead and presume that the major terms we got on things that are applicable to them, for instance, streaming success residuals, will carry through to them. They’re not going to do better. They do have specific needs regarding AI that we didn’t have, for instance, likeness, voice. They need to do more work on that. But we have given them a very good start, a very good basis. It was really important just for our sister union to see that we got much further than the DGA did with their language.

John: Speaking of SAG-AFTRA, of course they’re on strike right now, but in the times since these deals have come out, I’ve actually been talking to a lot of other labor organizations. I think there’s two principles that were tried to enshrine in this that are applicable to workers everywhere else is that AI cannot be used to replace the human worker and that you can’t use AI to drive down the wages or working conditions of the human worker. It’s going to be different in every industry, and it’s hard to make absolutes, but those are the kinds of guiding principles that you’re going to see other people try to enact to meet their specific needs in their industry.

Craig: Yes. This was the time it needed to happen.

John: We were uniquely positioned to handle it. It was just fate that the time came up at the right moment that we could do this.

Craig: Yes, things sort of lined up. We were unlucky in one regard that it fell in your lap. On the other sense though, we were very lucky that it fell in your lap when you guys were ready to start negotiating. That was good.

Lastly, I just want to talk about the overall value of the contract, because oftentimes – you’ve spent a lot of time in these Negotiating Committee rooms, I’ve spent some time in there – this becomes a bit of a shorthand of, how much money are we actually asking for? It gets calculated in various ways. But it was interesting to see, the amount that we were asking for and then the amount they initially offered, where we landed was a little bit under halfway.

You might think we should’ve gotten more or we should’ve been exactly halfway. But here’s the deal. What we were asking for was enormously more than we had ever asked for before. The Guild’s analysis is that where we landed is, the value of this contract is $233 million per year for three years. That is more per year than we got for the entirety of the 2023 year contract. I hope that puts it into perspective for people.

John: It’s also worth noting that 2020 was our biggest contract year to date.

Craig: That’s right. We didn’t do better. This was a paradigm shift, quantum leap. Pick your trope. This number is simply a different category of number. This contract is a different category of contract than any contract that the Guild has ever gotten in my career or yours.

Couple things to conclude, and then we’ll move on with the rest of our show. First, thank you, John. Thank you to you, the Negotiating Committee, the leadership, Chris Keyser, and Ellen. Ellen Stutzman deserves a medal. There’s something about the right person at the right time. I just think it was really important, the role she played and the way she played it. I was so impressed. I hope she continues to do that for us and for the companies, since we’re all working together again.

My parting advice for the companies in the aftermath of all this is to manage to do something that is very uncharacteristic for them from here on out, and that is avoid grinding labor down until our backs are against the wall, because the deal is, with this strike it was so evident that, as a labor force, our backs were against the wall. If you’re against the wall, you strike until you’re not. That’s it. You’ll strike forever. You’ll strike for a thousand years. It doesn’t matter, because there is no alternative that is success. Only success is success.

If they continue to follow that plan of theirs, to just chip away, chip away, chip away, they’re going to find themselves right back in the spot they were in in 2023, which was having perfectly, flawlessly, thoroughly motivated an entire union to walk the picket line for as long as it takes to get the biggest contract in union history. Try and avoid that, companies, because if it happens, we’ll strike again, and we will win again.

John: I’d second all of that. I would also say that it’s so easy to focus on the leaders of this organization and where we got to because of their hard work, but of course, it was the 10,000, 11,000 members who actually stood together through five very difficult months that made this all possible. It was really hard for basically everyone to do this.

Sometimes when you come out of a war, it’s hard to think about, what do I do next? I would encourage everyone to remember that you are in this Guild because you are the best writers of film and television in the world. That’s how you got to be here. It’s now your job to make the best film and television in the world, and to remind everybody that not only are you worth this $233 million, you’re still underpaid, you still should be paid more, that you are just absolutely unique in your abilities to do this.

All of the energy and brilliant and creativity we saw during these five months, everything that happened on the picket line, everything that happened online to support this, channel that energy, channel that brilliance into writing brilliant things. I would love for future historians to ask, “What happened in ’24 and ’25? Why did everything suddenly flourish and become so much better?” Maybe it’s because all the energy that was diverted into striking came back to where it really, truly belonged, which is on the page, and then we wrote just groundbreaking, incredible things.

Craig: I sure would love to see that. I have a question for you, John.

John: Please.

Craig: Were you writing at 12:01 a.m.?

John: No, I was not writing at 12:01 a.m., although shortly after it was called, I did send out those first emails to all the producers and all the people who I had not talked to in five months, saying, “Hello. Checking in. What’s happening?” It’s busy again, and it’s exciting. For the folks who it’s not busy for quite yet, just remember, the same drive and determination you showed over these last five months, show for yourself, and stand up for yourself, and stand up for your fellow writers.

Craig: I’m going to say I was playing D and D, in the game I play, not DM, on Tuesday. I think it was 11:30 p.m. when we finished. Everyone went home. I had a Diet Coke, watched the clock, and then it felt so good.

John: It did feel good.

Craig: One of the things that I think people don’t understand – certainly the companies don’t understand it – is that as much as we deserve to be treated correctly and compensated correctly, almost no one is driven to do this because of a love of money. We do this because we’re compelled to create things. It’s what we do. It’s how we define ourselves. One of the costs of a strike is disconnecting yourself from your thing, from the thing you’re supposed to be doing. It hurts. I hope everybody is enjoying reconnecting to the thing they’re supposed to be doing and having fun with it.

John: Fantastic. Drew, now, this is your part of the podcast, because you got a very interesting email this past week.

Drew Marquardt: I’m so excited to follow that up, by the way. I got an email this last week from Scriptnotes producer Megan McDonnell, sent September 24, 2018, which is five years ago-

John: Very exciting.

Drew: … asking me to follow up about Scriptnotes Episode 369 and the things you were talking about then, because you made five-year predictions then, and we can see if they came true. I went back and listened to Episode 369, and it also had a five-year follow-up, because producer Stuart Friedel had also sent an email five years into the future, because of course he did – that’s Stuart – to see if your predictions in Episode 108 about iPads making the way into movie theaters had come true. Of course, that did happen.

John: We all know that everyone brings their iPads into theaters all the time now.

Drew: Exactly.

John: That’s become so common. We were talking about it way back in, what was it, 2013 or whatever.

Craig: That was as close as you’re going to get to a meal-in-a-pill moment, John.

Drew: This is a chain going back 10 years in Scriptnotes history. It’s kind of like a wormhole. I figured listening to your predictions from Episode 369, they felt pretty timely and relevant to everything we’ve just been talking about, so I’m excited to hear you guys reflect on them.

John: Let’s listen to our predictions from Episode 369.

[Episode 369 Clip]

John: Let’s make some predictions for Megan to send five years in the future. Five years in the future, what’s going to become of award season, and what’s going to become of movies?

Craig: I’ll take the lead on this. Nothing will change. In five years, movies will pretty much be as movies are. There will be more original movies running on our screens at home through the Disney service and Netflix and so on. But there will still be huge theatrical releases coming out every single week. There will be a big summer box office battle issue of Entertainment Weekly and so on and so forth. When it comes to awards, nothing is going to change at all.

John: But will anything have changed in terms of getting writers and other people fairly compensated for movies that are not released theatrically?

Craig: No.

John: Will we figure any of that stuff out?

Craig: Nope.

John: We will have essentially the same conversation five years from now you predict?

Craig: Yep.

John: Franklin, what’s your thinking, five years in the future?

Franklin Leonard: It’s really hard for me to argue against that, honestly. Look, the theatrical business will still exist in five years. I think people will be going to see movies of all sorts. There will continue to be a giant summer blockbuster season and probably a six-month award season. As far as how people are compensated, I certainly hope there’s a change, but you guys have much deeper knowledge on the realities of that than I do, so I happily defer to your judgment.

John: A thing we found out as we surveyed screenwriters for the WGA is that 80% of screenwriters are also TV writers. Either they’re currently working in TV or they’re planning to work in TV. As these things get more and more combined, we’re going to have to figure out ways to do what Craig describes. Basically, after a certain window, every new time it’s watched, a nickel goes into the jar, because it shouldn’t really matter ultimately whether it was a 90-minute thing or a 30-minute thing. Just you pay that person.

Franklin: I totally agree.

John: There will be more things like Chernobyl, like Craig’s.

Franklin: Exactly, and more limited series specifically authored by Craig Mazin.

Craig: There will be at least one more. There will be at least one more of those.

Franklin: That’s my big call for 2023.

Craig: I do agree. I think that that is a format that is expanding, and expanding rapidly. It’s a tricky one, because I feel like a lot of these… Here’s another award season bunch of baloney. The whole limited series, not really limited. The Crown was a limited series its first season. No, it wasn’t. A lot of these limited series become these sort of backdoor seasons into a multi-season show. But I do think that that is going to… What’s happening is the television business seems to be shifting away from just pure ratings and into more of a kind of targeted depth. They’re like, “Look, we don’t need to be the Super Bowl. We don’t care if 80 million people watch. What we want is these five million people to all watch, if we can get those five million. And the only way to get those five million people is to show them this.” It doesn’t matter that most people don’t see it. These five million did, and that’s going to keep them paying for all the stuff, because they’re not going to watch any of the rest of this junk. They’re just going to watch this.

You start to get into the… There’s a great article by Malcolm Gladwell many, many years ago about how Prego figured out for the first time that if you sold five different kinds of Prego, you would make so much more money than if you just sold one kind of Prego. It’s the Prego-ization of television. That’s what’s happening. I think that is going to drive actually a lot of wonderful new content. I think there’s going to be a lot of limited series. There’s going to be more documentaries. There’s going to be all sorts of smart stuff. But for movies and for award stuff, I just think, as the guy says in Fallout, “War. War never changes.”

[end of clip]

John: Craig, how did we do five years ago? Which of these predictions do you think we landed on pretty well? Which ones were whiffs and misses for us?

Craig: I got to be honest. I think we did great. The one thing we missed was, what was going to happen just three months later, basically, which was COVID. Obviously, COVID was a massive monkey wrench into everything. But when it comes to theatrical, even in spite of COVID, it’s still here. There have been huge theatrical releases coming out. Are there huge ones every single week? No. Will we get back to that? Probably, yeah.

John: I would notice that during the strike, and of course we had the Barbenheimer phenomenon, and everyone was so desperate, like, “Oh my god, we need to make more movies, and of course we can’t make more movies right now.” You felt the industry having a frustration that they couldn’t do the thing which was so obvious they should be doing, because of the strike.

Craig: COVID and the strike certainly challenged our prediction, but I think that’s kind of why our prediction’s good, because if it hadn’t been good, between COVID and the strike, movies would be dead, theaters would be shuttered. That did not happen. I think we did really well there. I think we were right to suggest that the awards season, it’s the cockroach of seasons. Doesn’t matter what’s going on, there must be awards, and so the awards continue to happen, and the discussion and advertising around awards never, never, never seems to change.

John: That didn’t change over the course of the five years. This year is still an open question, because until a SAG-AFTRA deal is reached, they can’t do the normal award season stuff. I was talking with a friend who is an indie film publicist. There are these films that are going to festivals right now that have those SAG-AFTRA waivers, and so their actors can do the press. But the ones who came out in big studios can’t do that. It’s a really messy situation. Everyone is hoping and assuming that by the time it really becomes important, there will be a SAG-AFTRA deal, and normal things can resume. Of course, those same actors who were supposed to doing press, publicity for movies, are supposed to be also filming other movies, and their schedules are completely messed up. It gets sorted out.

Craig: Take it from me, as a guy that’s finally now looking at schedules. It’s just scrambled eggs out there, man. We’re all trying to figure this out. We’re talking about hiring a director, and she’s like, “But they have this other thing.” We’re like, “What are their dates?” She’s like, “I don’t know.” Nobody knows anything. Everybody’s just going to work together and figure that stuff out.

I agree with you. I think that SAG-AFTRA will hopefully conclude with a great deal for that union sooner rather than later. The award season will, I think, begin primarily in earnest in January, when you have the delayed Emmys, and then there’s Oscars and Golden Globes and all the rest of that. Fun, fun stuff.

John: Fun, fun stuff. There’s a prediction about more limited series, and that came true. There were a lot more limited series, especially for streaming, and so many of them that I couldn’t keep track of them. They just disappeared.

Craig: Yep, a gazillion of them. I think we’re probably set up for a contraction, not because of the strike, but because where else could you go? At some point, the balloon was going to pop. There are still a ton of those. Also, if the last five years have taught us anything, it’s that, with the rare exception of those remarkable shows that continue to do it the old way – Abbott Elementary – most television shows, even when they’re not limited series, are operating like limited series, 8 episodes, 10 episodes, 12 episodes, that sort of thing, and not coming out every fall. That format seems to be the format. It’s taken over.

John: I’ll disagree with you. I’ll put that on the record for our five-year follow-up. I think you’re going to see a lot more longer-run shows. The reason Daredevil is a 20-episode season, I think. I think these streamers and, of course, broadcast networks are finding, oh, it actually is more valuable to keep people watching a show over 20 weeks rather than the 8 weeks, and it’s more profitable for us. I think we’re going to see a return to some of those, also because once you’ve put a show out there, and it starts getting some traction, you don’t have to keep spending all the money marketing, because it can roll on its own. When there’s only 6, 8, 10 episodes of a show, it can be hard to keep it going, and it can be expensive to keep it going. Not every show is The Last of Us. Some shows, you try to launch them, and they don’t really launch, and that really kills you.

Craig: It does. I think you’re right from an economic point of view. It makes total sense. The challenge will be that the toothpaste is a little bit out of the tube in terms of quality, because when you have these shorter seasons or larger budgets, the audience gets used to a size of things. It’s hard for a standard 20-plus-episode rolling show to match that, although comedy is particularly well-tuned to match it. I got to be honest. I could see both. I’m not sure which way it’s going to go. I think what’s for sure is the limited series thing isn’t going away at all. It’s just will there be a clawing back from the traditional 22-episode season. That would be interesting to see.

John: Let me make my least controversial prediction, is that there will be a contraction, because there already was a contraction before the strike, a contraction back down towards a more normal, typical number of series and number of people employed on those series, just because there was a huge over-building phase during the early part of the streaming wars, and that’s going to stop. There will be a contraction. It’ll be wrongly blamed on the strikes, which were not actually a huge factor in it. It’s really about bottom lines and making shows for the right price.

Craig: Yeah. It’s almost weird to suggest it’s a contraction when it’s just an inevitability. Because of how over-productive the business was, there’s just too many things being made. Everybody knows it. Nobody can keep track of all of it. Nobody’s quite sure why. Even if there is a reduction in the amount of shows that are made, it will still be more shows than were ever made before. I think that’s likely, although, god, what happens if five years from now — I’m going to give her a name, Annalise — the new producer, says, “I got this five-year email from Drew, and apparently, you guys thought there wouldn’t be 14,000 shows each day.” And boy, will we look stupid.

John: We will look so, so dumb.

Craig: Dumb.

John: What are predictions for AI? Five years now, what things-

Craig: Oh my god.

John: … are we going to be expecting to see?

Craig: That’s a fool’s errand, honestly.

John: It truly is. Even as we were doing these AI proposals, I’d try to remind myself and everybody else, we cannot know beyond a certain horizon what this is going to look like, because some AI company we’ve never heard of could make a thing that is so compelling that it replaces our interest in film and television. Things could happen. We just don’t know.

Craig: We don’t know.

John: Something like TikTok.

Craig: We don’t know. It’s almost like an instant disqualifier if you see somebody babbling on about where AI is going to head. Who the hell knows? I have no clue. It would be interesting to ask AI where they think it’s going. I’m sure they also have no clue. I don’t know why I’m calling them they.

John: But also remember that the generative AI we’re talking about today, as we’re recording this in 2023, is just a prediction machine. It can say a thing, but it actually has no decision-making capability. It’s not sentient in any meaningful way. Yes, we get closer every day to things that kind of feel like Scarlett Johansson’s character in Her, but there’s not a consciousness happening there, and we need to make sure that we don’t mistake that, at least as we’re recording this in September of 2023.

Craig: What we call AI today, people later will call something else, because we’ll have something else. I refuse to predict.

John: Streaming. How many streaming services will there be? Of the existing streaming services, which ones get merged, combined? Do new ones come online? What do you think is happening five years from now, Craig?

Craig: Anybody that’s going to try and launch a new streaming service right now is insane. That feels almost suicidal. I think Apple’s not going anywhere, because they can afford to do this until the end of time. I don’t think Amazon’s going anywhere, for the same reason. Same reason with HBO/Max. The interesting thing is, Disney has Hulu and FX, so it’s three streaming services smushed together into one of them. Similarly, there’s Paramount Plus, smushed in with Showtime.

John: It’s also CBS.

Craig: Then that’s also CBS. What’s that? It does seem like I could see some squishing down there. I do not predict that there will be another swallowing of a major company the way Disney swallowed Fox.

John: I agree with you there. I think there’s going to be just too much heightened attention. Unless we get an entirely Republican administration that wants everything to be mega-merged, I don’t think the FTC or other people in regulatory functions would allow that to happen.

Craig: I think maybe people have seen enough now to go, “I don’t know if buying these companies makes sense,” because it seems like everybody’s tried to buy Warner Bros at this point. Maybe Target.

John: Target.

Craig: Warner Bros Target.

John: Love it.

Craig: That’s not bad.

John: It’s not bad.

Craig: That’s my prediction, Warner Bros Target.

John: While I don’t think there’ll be a new streaming service, I think some of the AVOD or FAST services, the equivalent of what’s now Pluto TV or other things, I think more people will watch those. I think it’s actually a good market for shows that are no longer valuable to a streamer but still have value out there in the world. Yes, it feels like old broadcast or cable, and that’s fine. It’s fine.

Craig: It’s essential, because what’s happened is, as these companies have chased Netflix –which is stuck in its one moat, because it has no other moat it can do — they’ve sat there going, “But wait. We used to make money off of Friends, because we would license Friends. But now we don’t, because we just show it to people ourselves. Why did we do that?” It’s interesting. HBO is strange in this regard. They license their shows to Amazon. Some people watch my show via Amazon, and they pay for it a la carte, which is great. That means that’s kind of a syndication. I think we will see more of that. I think we will see more shows being licensed to ad-supported streaming. It’s inevitable. It’s smart business. There are a lot of people who have no problem watching stuff with commercials as long as they don’t have to pay for it. That’s what television used to be.

John: It was, one day. Hey, Drew, is there anything else we didn’t make predictions about that you want to hear our prognostications?

Drew: I have heard rumors around indie TV coming. Do you think that might happen at all?

John: Can you describe indie TV? I want to make sure we’re talking about the same thing.

Drew: Indie TV is stuff that’s made independently and then licensed to a network, which sort of is the same where you have a typical studio that then licenses it to a network, and it has international distribution, but doing it more on a show-by-show basis.

John: Craig and I both, pretty recently we advocated for, “Oh, that model actually was good for a lot of people.” I don’t know that we’d be able to get there without some government regulation. We don’t have to get all the way back to [indiscernible 53:36], but without some motivation, on a governmental level, I think it would be tough. Craig, what are you thinking?

Craig: You do see this sort of thing still with variety and talk. Independent companies create a talk show, because it’s so cheap to make.

John: True.

Craig: Then they license it to exhibitors to run. That’s how we ended up with 500 Oprah clones in the ’90s.

John: The Ricki Lake Show, for example. You take a celebrity, you build a show around them, you license it to stations.

Craig: Sally Jessy Raphael. There were so many of them. There are still a lot of these things. But traditional narrative shows are expensive. They are so expensive that typically in the old days, when one company would produce them, and another company would air them, the company that produced them would deficit finance them, meaning they lost money. They would continue to lose money, because the licensing fee did not cover anywhere near what it cost to produce the show, until the show went into syndication, at which point it was all profit. It is an incredibly difficult thing to finance television shows without having some sort of massive financial safety net under you. I would be surprised.

John: I would be surprised too for scripted, but you never know. For all we know, there could be much cheaper versions of shows or much cheaper ways to make shows that we’re not thinking about right now, that become successful. Just the same way TikTok videos don’t cost money to make. There may be something like that that becomes a different means of production. Hard to say.

Craig: Yeah. If it doesn’t cost that much to make, what do you need those places for anyway? You just put it on TikTok.

John: Yeah. Drew, bundle this up, please. Send it five years into the future. What did we say, Annalise is her next name?

Craig: Annalise.

John: Annalise. She will open it up and be surprised by it, but hopefully also charmed and delighted like we are whenever we think of Megan McDonnell and Stuart Friedel.

Craig: That’s right.

Drew: Good luck, Annalise.

John: Also, the bottom of the email is like, “John and Craig are monsters. Run.”

Craig: “Dear Annalise, you are not yet born, but I write to you now to warn you.”

John: It is time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is this very cool, interactive visualization done by Alvin Chang for Pudding, called 24 Hours in an Invisible Epidemic. It’s about loneliness. It’s taken from this American Time Use Survey that looks at what Americans are doing hour by hour over the course of their day. It’s tracking, oh, they are grocery shopping, they are cleaning their house, they are at work.

Some of the things you discover in this is that people spend so much of their time alone, or at least not with friends and family members. One of the things that was shocking to see is this one chart that shows, among people 34 and younger, the time spent with friends has just plummeted. It’s just down so much. Some of that is the pandemic, but some of it’s also just sort of other structural changes in society.

Why that matters, there’s also this concept called Cantril’s ladder. They say, “Imagine a ladder. At the top of your ladder is your best possible life. The bottom is your worst possible life. Which step of the ladder do you personally stand on at the present time?” They ask people this question, and the people who are not around friends and family, they rank themselves very, very low.

It’s just a really nice way of visualizing and talking about something that’s hard to see, which is that people are not just alone, but lonely, and this is not good. We need to be thinking about how to get people around family and friends and feeling better about life.

Craig: Given everyone so many other things to do, that are so easy to do, and so here we are. We’re part of the problem, aren’t we? Because I’m looking at this chart, and there’s a whole lot of watching TV. Sorry.

John: We’ve always had TV though.

Craig: But there’s so much more of it.

John: There is more.

Craig: There’s so much more. Also, everybody had to watch the same show at the same time, kind of. If you missed it, you missed it. Then you had to gather around the TV. There was a great book that was written about the culture of television in America, called The Cool Fire, the idea being that it was the new fireplace. Now everybody can just go to their corners, they have their own screens, and watch their own things. They can watch whatever they want, whenever they want, and there’s way too much. There’s more than they could ever watch. Sorry, America.

John: Some of these are not new concepts. I’m looking at the famous book Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam, which was talking about the scourge of loneliness and people losing a sense of community. But I do think the pandemic, remote work, you’ve taken away the places in which people would not only be around people, but also make new friendships. We need to I think just be much more proactive about finding places to meet people. I have a friend who went to a board game meetup, specifically just like, “I just need to be around some new people.” That’s great. That’s taking good initiative. I also have friends who were talking about, “Oh, I realize I have a best friend who lives in another city. I don’t really care. It doesn’t really matter where I live. I’m just going to move to that city where my best friend lives.” I think that’s a great choice.

Craig: Unless that best friend’s like, “I’m not your best friend. Please leave me alone.” Happily, you and I have D and D.

John: Which solves everything.

Craig: Solves everything.

John: It does. But I would say during the pandemic, our Zoom D and D games were some of the only consistent social interactions I had with people outside of my family.

Craig: Exactly right, the D and D games. Then I was involved in a bunch of Zoom Mafia games that were incredibly elaborate and fun. That was it. It was like, what else can you do? You can’t go anywhere. You can’t do anything. Very cool. I like that it’s also for Pudding. I like just the thought, Alvin Chang did this for Pudding, like he was paid in pudding. But apparently, it’s a place called Pudding.

John: It’s a site called Pudding. It mostly does interactive visualizations of stuff.

Craig: Do you think Alvin Chang sat there and realized that some people were going to spend a bunch of time alone looking at Pudding?

John: Maybe he did. I will say actually, it has a tip jar on it. It was the best set up tip jar I’ve ever seen, so I tipped Alvin Chang really for all the incredible hard work he clearly did to make this.

Craig: Pudding. I have, uncharacteristically, two One Cool Things, because sometimes I have none. First one, easy, Rusty Lake, Underground Blossom. Everybody who listens to the podcast knows how much I love the Rusty Lake games. They have a new one out. It’s called Underground Blossom, the story of Laura, who’s a tragic figure, like literally every other character in Rusty Lake. Terrific puzzles. The theme is you are on a subway car, moving through various subway stations, but each station is a different place in time. The classic Rusty Lake vibe, good puzzles, weird, creepy, disgusting, funny, the usual. Well worth the purchase there.

My second One Cool Thing is a woman named Melissa Smith. I’ve probably mentioned before, John, that I took an acting class in college. That acting class was probably the best instruction I ever received on writing, because I learned what had to happen between the page and performance. We write for actors. Melissa Smith was the head of the acting program at Princeton. She was wonderful. She’s a wonderful teacher, very good actor. Very good actor. I just learned so much from her.

All these years go by, and I did a Zoom seminar with one of the screenwriting classes at Princeton. The instructor had said, “Hey, do a One Cool Thing.” I was like, “You know what? I think my One Cool Thing will be Melissa Smith.” I went to look her up, to see where she was, because it’s rare that people stay the entire time in one place. Indeed, she did move on from Princeton at some point and became the Conservatory Director at the American Conservatory Theater and also continued to act and played Frances McDormand’s sister in Nomadland, in fact-

John: Oh, nice. I didn’t know.

Craig: … and died two years ago.

John: Oh, god.

Craig: And that’s where I went… Here’s the thing. We get older, and we forget everybody else is getting older, especially when they were already older to begin with. We just think that we’re the only ones getting older. There are people in your life who were, back then, the age you are now. You will let 30 years go by. Actually, she was much younger than I am now. She was 64 years old. You will let all this time go by. Then you think, “Oh, you know what? I can drop them an email and tell them what they mean to me.” No, not always.

If you have that instinct, do it, because I never had a chance to tell Melissa Smith exactly how important I thought her instruction was and how formative it was for me as a writer. I didn’t even know that that was her in Nomadland, because all that time had gone by. She was just a terrific person and a brilliant actor and a really, really good teacher, just really good. More than anything, she taught me how important brutal honesty was in what we do. Honesty, which hurts all the time. Thank you to Melissa Smith. You are my One Cool Thing this week. I’m sorry I didn’t get to tell you.

John: Excellent. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Holland Gallagher. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. You can send us an outro. If you want to send me a three-minute version, that’s lovely, but honestly, a 30-second version is much more useful, because that’s about as much as we’re going to use. I would say don’t kill yourself to do the extra 2 minutes 30 seconds. Give us the 30-second one.

ask@johnaugust.com is also the place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on dreams. Craig, Drew, thank you so much for a good episode.

Craig: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Craig?

Craig: Yes?

John: Are you a dreamer?

Craig: Yes.

John: Yes?

Craig: Yes, of course.

John: How important are dreams in your life? Do they just disappear, or do they stick with you at all?

Craig: Sometimes they’ll stick with me a little bit because they were particularly bizarre, but I give them no import. I seek within them no reason. I do not dwell upon them. I don’t think they’re significant in any way, shape, or form. But I definitely dream. I definitely dream.

John: I’m a big dreamer myself. I will say that it feels like I spend at least as much time asleep as awake. I feel like I spend a tremendous amount of time in my dream space. I know that’s all really an illusion, because your dreams are just your brain kind of going through its washing cycle. It’s your brain cleaning up all the goop and getting yourself ready for what’s next, and yet I love my dreams. I genuinely enjoy them most of the time. I’m lucky I very rarely have nightmares, and most of my dreams are cool. I sort of like being in them. Drew, are you a dreamer?

Drew: I am a dreamer. It comes in and out. I was also wondering too, do you guys feel that you have a few days of certain tone of dreams? Maybe it’s just me. But three days in a row, the dreams will be sort of similar in tone.

John: I definitely notice the tone and nature of my dreams can change based on what’s happening in my life. At times when I’m stressed out in my life, the dreams can reflect that, or at least the fact that my life circumstances are different will be affected in my dreams. When I’m sick, my dreams are different. If I’m super jet-lagged, if I’m in a strange place, if I’m going to bed at a weird time, that will affect my dreams. Craig?

Craig: Yeah, the dreams that I fear the most are not nightmares. Honestly, if I do have a real nightmare, I’m actually quite thrilled, because it’s intense, and I might be able to steal something from it. But it’s the dreams where I am stuck doing a task or trying to solve a problem that is unsolvable and unending. All you need to do is just move this box to this corner and this box over to here. Oh, but it moved again. You just spend seemingly hours exhausting yourself in your own dream because your brain is stuck in a solve loop. I hate those. They do happen every now and again.

John: Do either of you have moments of lucid dreaming, where you’re aware that you’re dreaming, and you can affect what you’re seeing and what you’re experiencing? I’ve had it rarely, but it’s not a thing I’ve sought or tried to control.

Drew: I had it this week, where I thought I was having a full conversation with my fiancée as she was getting ready to leave early one day, and then I realized that I was still in bed and that I was sort of having a completely different conversation. But I knew that I was dreaming. I wasn’t controlling it necessarily, but I was aware of the two.

Craig: I’m aware sometimes, I guess, “Oh, this is a dream.” Somebody was saying that they wanted to train themselves to be able to do whatever they wanted in their dream. That’s a little scary to me. I think if we gave you the power to do whatever you wanted in the world, you would do it, you would seize that power. I’m a fairly humble dreamer, I guess. Here’s what obsesses me about dreams. What obsesses me about dreams is they’re all from my brain, but things are constantly happening in dreams that surprise. People are constantly saying things in dreams that I did not know they were going to say. I don’t understand how that works.

John: I would say the current best guesses and understanding of what’s happening with dreams is that, as I said, it’s your brain going through its maintenance cycle and clearing off the stuff. But you have to remember that of course our brains are taking in all this external stimulation normally and creating meaning out of it, because what our eyes are seeing and what our ears are hearing isn’t really what we’re experiencing. That’s our brain forcing meaning onto it, which is why we have optical illusions and auditory illusions.

In this case, some part of your conscious brain or some part of your brain is experiencing all this crap that’s being thrown up by this cleaning process and trying to create a narrative meaning out of it or trying to make sense of it. That’s why it seems to have some dream logic to it. There’s no one in charge of the narrative there. It’s pattern matching. It’s actually not that different than when the eye is hallucinating. It’s stringing together the next thing. It doesn’t know whether it really makes sense.

Craig: It doesn’t even need to make sense. Really, the thing that puzzles me is that I don’t know what’s about to happen. How can I surprise myself? How can somebody in my head say something that makes sense in conversation, that I didn’t predict they were going to say?

John: It comes down to the assumption there is a Craig Mazin, there is a myself.

Craig: This is the thing.

John: The homunculus problem.

Craig: The problem is, it seems to me not a problem, just a fact, that our consciousness can absolutely split. In a weird way, that’s what we’re doing when we’re writing, consciously, I think.

John: I think so.

Craig: We’re just being other people. It is amazing to me that in our dream state, we still reserve some kind of weird consciousness. We understand there’s a concept of I. I went into a room, and I picked up a thing. Then something leapt out at me and freaked me out. Whatever is creating the leapt out and freaked me out bit, that section of the brain somehow can function entirely independently of the eye portion of the brain. That is fascinating to me.

John: It is.

Craig: I don’t think anybody knows how that works.

John: No. I would say that my POV inside dreams is not first-person shooter. It can vary a lot. Sometimes that can be a person inside the dream, not often, but sometimes. Sometimes I am watching a movie to some degree. It’s always strange. At times I’ll see extreme angles in my dreams. It’s like, why is this top-down shot from the ceiling? That doesn’t make sense. I as a person could never be there. But I guess it’s the person who’s watched movies in me or the part of my brain that’s watched movies has made that choice. It’s a strange thing. But I think we assume that there’s an intended viewer for this dream, and it’s probably not accurate.

Craig: I’m an FPS dreamer.

John: You think you’re always looking through the virtual eyes of yourself in your dreams?

Craig: I don’t recall ever waking up going, “I was just watching myself do something.” In fact, I’m positive I’ve never had that experience. I’m a first-person dreamer. We have a lot of theories about all of it. The other thing that they always say is, everybody dreams. It’s just that a lot of times you don’t remember it.

John: Exactly. It’s probably good that you don’t remember it too vividly, because it would mess you up.

Craig: Because it’s a nightmare.

John: It’s a nightmare. You said that maybe you’ll have a nightmare, and that nightmare will inspire you to write some sort of scene. Have you written anything that has been directly or indirectly prompted by a dream? You woke up, like, “Oh, yeah, that’s the thing.”

Craig: Not per se. It’s really more of a weird vibe. It’s like, okay, I remember feeling deeply disturbed by this little thing. I’m just going to channel that disturbed feeling. Sometimes all I’m trying to do is reaction match. I know what it feels like to be particularly creeped out. Is this giving me that feeling? Is this giving me that feeling? Happily, most of us will never experience something that is on par with whatever happens in a horror movie, but we can imagine it. Dreams are a chance to have that. A dream or a nightmare version of creeping you out always seems more intense than a movie version, always, than things you see that other people come up with.

John: I can’t think of the exact example, but there was one time where I woke up and realized, oh, that actually just was the scene of whatever I was writing. Like, oh, that was the scene. I just wrote down the dialogue that was in the scene. That literally became the scene. But that’s really rare. I’ve never even really tried to be the person who, “Okay, now, I’m going to think before I go to bed about the scene I’m trying to write or the story problem I’m trying to solve, and let my dreams do it.” That’s never been a [crosstalk 1:12:58] for me.

Craig: Dream dialogue generally is total garbage.

Drew: Do you ever have the dreams where you hear the greatest song you’ve ever heard, and you wake up and you try and explain it and it’s garbage, it’s just gobbledygook?

Craig: I’m glad you mentioned that. Never, ever tell somebody your dream. Never do it. Never tell it. It’s boring. It’s boring for everyone, unless there’s crazy sex involved, and then you have to be careful who you’re telling it to. Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever tell people your dream, because you think it’s so interesting, and everyone’s bored, always, 100% of the time.

John: I think the only time you’re interested is the question of like, why would you tell me this dream? What is it you’re trying to reveal about yourself in this dream? But that’s not very often.

Craig: No, it’s usually like, “Oh my god, the craziest thing happened, and then, and then, and then… ” Shut up.

John: Also, the fact that it is “and then, and then, and then” is part of the reason why there’s not narrative logic there. As we’ve talked about on the show countless times, if your recap of a story is “and then, and then, and then,” there’s a problem, because there’s not a forward drive.

Craig: Completely.

John: We want better dreams. Better dreams in 2024.

Craig: I love it.

John: That’s my motto. Cool.

Craig: Are you running for president?

John: That’s what it is. By the way, I’m running for president.

Craig: Awesome. Thanks, guys.

John: See you.

Craig: Bye.

Drew: Bye.

Links:

• WGA Tentative Agreement Summary
• Scriptnotes, Episode 369 – What is a Movie, Anyway? from 2018
• Scriptnotes, Episode 108 – Are two screens better than one? from 2013
• 24 Hours in an Invisible Epidemic by Alvin Chang
• Melissa Smith, longtime head of ACT’s MFA program, dies at 64 by Sam Hurwitt
• Rusty Lake Underground Blossom
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
• John on Mastodon
• Outro by Holland Gallagher (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.