John welcomes writer and showrunner Francesca Sloane (Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Atlanta) to talk about her process of bringing a big-screen property to television. She shares how she and Donald Glover found their way into the story, how it evolved in development, building a room that was all women of color, re-writing on set, and the many lessons she learned as a first time showrunner.
We also follow up on writing partners and phonetic alphabets before answering listener questions on writing samples, casting on the page and why some screenplays are free to read.
In our bonus segment for premium members, we dig into the benefits (and drawbacks) of film schools and fellowships.
Links:
* [Francesca Sloane](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4300986/) on [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/f__sloane/)
* [Mr. & Mrs. Smith](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CLRQGR5G?ref=DVM_US_DL_SL_GO_AOS_MAMS_mkw_sfphkCC9t-dc&mrntrk=pcrid_689516632965_slid__pgrid_156782128925_pgeo_9030930_x__adext__ptid_kwd-2265602445555) on Amazon Prime Video
* [ISPA: Inter-Species Phonetic Alphabet for Transcribing Animal Sounds](https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03269) by Masato Hagiwara, Marius Miron and Jen-Yu Liu
* [Bluets by Maggie Nelson](https://www.wavepoetry.com/products/bluets)
* [A Unified Theory of F-cks by Mandy Brown](https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/unified-theory-of——)
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* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Eric Pearson ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/631standard.mp3).
**UPDATE 04-01-24:** The transcript for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/scriptnotes-episode-631-adapting-for-television-transcript).