Quinceañera

Prologue

How Scriptnotes Started

Revisiting Episode One

2011 in Movies and TV

Answering Our First Question Again

Listener Questions on Time and Pacing

One Cool Thing

Bonus Segment

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: Today on the show, the year was 2011. It was the height of the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street. The Harry Potter franchise had just come to an end, lol, while Fifty Shades of Grey had just been published. Into this roiling moment exactly 15 years ago, Craig, a new podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters, was launched. Craig, do you know the name of the podcast?

Craig: I don’t listen to podcasts, John. Was it Scriptnotes?

John: It was Scriptnotes.

Craig: Nailed it, nailed it. It’s the one podcast I know.

John: Today is our quinceañera. It’s our 15th birthday. To look back and celebrate 15 years of doing this show, here’s a special episode: our quinceañera. We’ll also do what we’ve always done, which is answer listener questions. In our bonus segment for premium members, let’s move our attention from the past to the future and anticipate where we’ll be 15 years from now in 2041.

Craig: Exciting.

John: Exciting.

Craig: What really gets me here is the stuff that you cited historically that’s going on.

John: There’s more as we get into it. There’s some good stuff. I think we should probably explain for our non-American listeners is what the hell a quinceañera is. Craig, can you give us some sense of what a quinceañera is?

Craig: A quinceañera is a celebration, I believe, typically of a young girl’s 15th birthday. I think of it notably as something that Latinas do. I think it’s a traditional Mexican celebration, but it could be all of Central America. I don’t think it’s a South America thing. I don’t think it’s a Spanish thing. I think it’s mostly Mexican and Central American, but I could be wrong.

John: I think of pretty dresses. I think of fancy dresses.

Craig: Yes, big Easter-style dresses. It’s basically like it’s a more frilly and fancy Sweet 16, but it’s 15.

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John: Yes, that’s great. Craig, this is the moment where I ask, so 2011, but do you remember how this all started? What is your memory of the beginning of Scriptnotes?

Craig: I got a call from you. We were both making blogs. We had the same agent at the time. I talked to you because I had technical blog questions. You were very helpful. Then you called me and you said you were thinking about doing a podcast. You were thinking about combining forces and we could do a podcast together. I was like, great, except I didn’t know what podcast was, which I think I withheld from that conversation. What I did glean from you was that it would be talking and not writing. I love the sound of that.

John: That is also my memory of things. Then over this last week, we were going through old files because we were trying to consolidate all of the Scriptnotes files onto one server so we actually have a source of truth for things. I found a recording that predated Scriptnotes. This was you and I on a, I guess a Skype call at that point, talking through what this would be like. I want to play this recording for you…

Craig: Oh my god.

OLD RECORDING:

***Craig:** There was one that you picked out.*

***John:** It’s a Scriptnotes. Fine.*

***Craig:** It’s okay.*

***John:** Notes on craft.*

***Craig:** Nothing is worse than screenwriting 101. That’s the worst title ever, but that’s the right idea.*

***John:** Things about screenwriting are interesting to us.*

***Craig:** It’s like screenwriting 204. God, I’m the worst at this. I can’t even title my movies. Screencraft. Pro-writing. You could also be vaguely arty about it, like 120 pages or something like that.*

***John:** 12-point courier.*

***Craig:** Three-hole punch with John and Craig.*

***John:** I would like to vote for Scriptnotes until we think of something better.*

***Craig:** I second that motion. All in favor, aye. Aye. *

***John:** Aye.*

***John:** I’m trying to think of other good points to talk about. Oh, randomly, I had coffee with Heather Hatch today, who was at your seminar at the Guild.*

***Craig:** Oh, cool. What did you think?*

***John:** I liked it.*

***Craig:** It was two hours that basically was saying the same thing in different ways. Some of it was practical tips about how to deal with bad notes, and some of it was practical tips about how to deal with bad employers. The big message of the whole thing was that in the end, the enemy is your own emotional pain, and that every time you put your emotional pain in the management thereof first, you are essentially paving the path toward your own firing. You can feel emotional pain, and you will, but you just can’t make that job number one.*

***John:** Well, this feels like this podcast-y kind of conversation.*

***Craig:** There you go.*

***John:** Happening in our podcast. Let’s hit Stop.*

**OLD RECORDING ENDS.**

Craig: GarageBand, oh my God. All right, so lift the needle off your vinyl imprinter. Let the tubes cool.

John: So many crazy things about this. This is-

Craig: Insane.

John: June 11th, 2011, is this recording. A couple of things. Our mics sound terrible. We’re recording GarageBand. A lot of what you hear in the background, that clicking sound, is my dog, Louis, walking around. Louis, rest in peace. Louis was a pug. He looked like a dog. He wasn’t actually a dog. He was some sort of just mindless robot who was furry, who saw everybody as salty robots that he could lick. They had some sense of what the show was, but we didn’t even have a name for the show yet.

Craig: We didn’t have a name for the show, but we sound the same, but that was 15 years ago.

John: Yes. I noticed I was doing the thing which you hated so much, where you would say something and I would say, yes. I would leave it there. I have gotten better about that. I don’t usually be hanging so much.

Craig: The best was when I would say something, then there’d be a long pause and then, yes. Then it was almost like I could just feel you like, you idiot. That’s us. That’s who we were. We were the same. Maybe that’s why people like this podcast. I’m still struggling to figure out why. I think maybe the reason is because we are unchanging. We’re very stable. That podcast Zero, it’s our vibe.

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John: That’s our vibe now. Meredith, you went back and listened to Episode One. Can you talk us through some of the things you learned going back to Episode One that we might have forgotten?

Meredith: Also, I do think that recording belongs in the Smithsonian. Two men on mic discussing in 2011 the possibility of starting a podcast.

John: Iconic.

Meredith: It’s iconic.

Craig: Where else would they find that? There’s only one million of those.

Meredith: You have to document that. Okay. A couple of things I noticed from Episode One. Firstly, Craig, you say your name normally in the intro.

Craig: Yes. I don’t know when I started doing it. I don’t know why I started doing it, but it just happened one day. I don’t know. I’m sure when it happened, John thought, stop it.

Meredith: I think that’s right. John, you had a flub. You said within the first, I think it was maybe the first minute or two of the podcast.

Craig: Please tell me he did it. Did he do it?

Meredith: No, he didn’t do the brr.

Craig: Oh, he didn’t do brr. Damn it.

Meredith: He didn’t do that. He just rolled with it. You said we’re going to be dig-deeping into these subjects. Then you guys laughed and decided you would leave it in.

John: All right. I love that.

Meredith: You discuss pitching, particularly going to a first meeting with the studio and laying out your take. You declare you won’t be a very news-following podcast, but you might cover some timely things from time to time. You don’t have a one cool thing in the first episode and obviously no bonus segment.

Craig: No. It took a while for that too.

Meredith: You end with, we think we’re going to do this fairly regularly.

John: In fact, we did. Every Tuesday for 15 years, we’ve done a podcast.

Craig: Incredible.

John: It’s also worth noting how much has changed over the years. Stuart Friedel, who was both my assistant and the producer, but we didn’t call him a producer yet at the start, was doing a lot of the work. I was actually cutting all the episodes myself in GarageBand, which was the best tool to do that in at the moment. We were recording remotely. We would have the same time call in on Skype. I would call Craig or Craig would call me through Skype. We were each recording our sides locally, which we still basically do except we do it on Zoom now.

Matthew Chilelli started writing our outros at a certain point. Then when I met him in person, I said, hey, do you think you could cut the show? He’s like, yes, I could cut the show. He’s been cutting the show ever since. God bless him.

Craig: Seriously. Scriptnotes is like a weird, it’s like the La Brea Tar Pit. People just wander in and then–

John: They’re there forever. We said that Stuart was eventually credited as the producer because he was really doing the producing work, which is posting the episodes, dealing with the incoming mail, all that stuff. By the time that Drew was our producer, I asked him yesterday and he said like 80% of his job was Scriptnotes producer and only 20% was my assistant, which is part of the reason why I was like, you know what, this doesn’t make sense. We split off the job as Scriptnotes producer, and now I have Meredith as our first full-time Scriptnotes producer and Drew as my full-time assistant. It’s a godsend. It could change.

We have Lauren helping out as well because one of the other big changes is that we started recently shooting video for a lot of our stuff. While we don’t release full video episodes at this point, we are using that video for social media, for other things. We’re just building out a lot more stuff and that’s a change that’s happened over this time. Crissant does the newsletter called Interesting, which is that little offshoot of Scriptnotes. That’s a new addition. Some infrastructure changes. The whole reason I was able to find that audio was because we’re just consolidating everything onto a central server so we can find where things are.

You make choices at the start of a project not knowing where it’s going to evolve to. We were doing the blog posts for every episode the exact same way for 15 years. It’s not really the right way to do them. We would post the episode, and then we would also post the transcript later as a separate post. It was confusing for people if people weren’t finding it. Now we just update the main post with the transcript, and we’re going through and changing all the back episodes so that they match that format.

Craig: There’s only 750 of them, so it shouldn’t take long.

John: No. I think the other thing we’re doing differently now, and this is partly based on the Scriptnotes survey we did, is that people really like it when it’s you and me talking. We’re banking some episodes to make sure that even when you get too busy or I get too busy, that we have episodes with the two of us there. Going forward, we’re recording this episode several weeks ahead of when it’ll actually drop because we want the two of us talking.

Craig: I like that people still like the two of us talking. It wouldn’t be such a bummer if their top answer was, less of the two of you talking.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: That’s all this is.

John: It’s you more as two solo acts rather than–

Craig: We like Siskel or Ebert.

John: Oh my God, the combination? The worst.

Craig: I don’t know. We don’t like conversation.

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John: I want to spend a little time here talking about 2011 so we have a context of what we’re going into because it’s crazy. I decided some of those things in the intro. Meredith, can you help us out? Talk us through. Let’s start with the movies. What were the movies of 2011?

Meredith: When I was looking through 2011, I realized, wow, it’s kind of an incredible year. Just to list it off, Moneyball, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, as for mentioned, Crazy Stupid Love, Drive, The Untouchables, Captain America: The First Avenger, Pirates of the Caribbean, On Strange Tides, The Help, Bridesmaids, Thor, The Cabin in the Woods, X-Men First Class, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Source Code, Limitless, Horrible Bosses, Shame, Super 8, Cars 2, Rio, Rango, No Strings Attached, Friends with Benefits, Midnight in Paris, The Lincoln Lawyer, The Hangover Part 2–

Craig: Yes, I remember that one.

Meredith: Contagion, Melancholia, The Descendants, One Day, The Adjustment Bureau, Mission Impossible, Ghost Protocol, Hugo, Tinker Tailor, Soldier Spy, The Ides of March, Scream 4, The Twilight Saga, Breaking Dawn Part 1, Puss in Boots, 50/50, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Jane Eyre, Young Adult, Bernie, The Muppets, Mr. Popper’s Penguins, The Artist, which won the Academy Award, I believe, that year, Water for Elephants, From Up on Poppy Hill, and Jiro Dreams of Sushi.

John: The fact that 95% of those titles, I recognize, and I can picture, I can describe what happened in it, that was a crazy year for movies.

Craig: Also, just a regular year for movies. That’s how they worked. That’s why we had careers in movies, because there was just a constant development, and you could make all sorts of stuff. You could make things that cost $20 million, $30 million, $15 million, $100 million. It was all over the place, but you could do this because every weekend people would fill the movie theaters.

John: I think it’s so great that we’re starting with Moneyball there, because of course, we did a Moneyball episode, a deep dive on Moneyball, which is great. I think you look through that list of movies, and there’s some really good scripts underlying those really good movies. I would say Captain America: The First Avenger, setting up really the template for what the Marvel franchise is going to be like. Yes, you had Iron Man separately from that, but this is what gets into a bigger, broader sense of how big the Marvel Universe could be. Horrible Bosses as an R-rated comedy. Hangover Part 2, a comedy sequel, which is not a thing we were commonly seeing. Then the smaller ones like The Descendants, Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. There was just a whole range of movies that were successful in that time.

Craig: Yes, that whole range of things. Clearly, nobody had a problem making all these movies, and they were making money making all these movies. Sometimes I think that when they say they can’t make money making movies anymore, what they’re really saying is we can’t make as much money making movies in theaters as we can if we just make them and put them on streaming. The economics can’t solely be, oh, people don’t go to the movies anymore, because they do.

John: They do. 2026 is a great example of people going back to the movies. This has been a great year for movies as well, both creatively and financially.

Craig: People have gone to the movies, and it’s been terrific. This feels like the first year where it’s actually almost as normal since COVID.

John: Well, let’s talk about television now, because this was also a big year in television.

Meredith: Game of Thrones premiered.

Craig: What? What? I’m sorry, what? What is that?

Meredith: Game of Thrones premiered.

Craig: Oh my God.

Meredith: Along with that premiere, American Horror Story, New Girl, The Voice, and Homeland.

John: All great shows. Great shows that defined moments.

Craig: Went on and on and on from there.

John: Absolutely. American Horror Story became a franchise. Game of Thrones became a franchise. New Girl was iconic in its time. So many writers came out of the New Girl room. The Voice adds a sense of the big competition show. Homeland, again, great writing. A very difficult, damaged central character who you’re following through things. Great.

Craig: Out of curiosity, I think Jesse has become obsessed with New Girl. Is that a thing now? Remember when Jesse and Amy were both watching whatever it was?

John: They were watching the crime show: Dangerous Minds.

Craig: Dangerous Minds. No, Criminal Minds.

John: You’re absolutely right. No, it wasn’t the Michelle Pfeiffer movie.

Craig: Is that a thing now? They’re all watching New Girl?

Meredith: New Girl is definitely one of those shows that’s in the repeat pipeline now, like Friends and Gilmore Girls.

John: As we’re recording this, there is talk that there’s going to be a revival or some sort of continuation of New Girl, because why not?

Craig: I’m cool. It makes sense. Discover all this good stuff. I love it.

John: It’s also the end of two big franchises here.

Meredith: Yes. Oprah ended her show after 25 years, and Regis Philbin retired from Regis & Kelly.

Craig: Regis Philbin. What a guy. Regis Philbin.

John: There were series that were still in full swing.

Meredith: At this time, Breaking Bad was still currently airing, Downton Abbey, Parks and Rec, Community, How I Met Your Mother, and Modern Family.

Craig: All great.

John: All great. So many of those we’ve talked about repeatedly on the show. Modern Family, one of the best pilots ever in terms of understanding what the show was from the jump.
**Craig:** Breaking Bad, right up there with one of the best pilots ever.

John: Absolutely. I don’t think we talked about Downton Abbey, but such a good show for being what felt like a stuffy period drama, but was just incredibly relatable, and a soap opera, and the ways that people love a soap opera. We’ve had Parks and Rec. We’ve had Mike Schur talking about Parks and Rec, which also had growing pains. It had to figure out its tone over the course of that first season, and that came back so much stronger in the second season. Community, come on. A great show. Joke density is so high. For a really questionable premise, could just keep generating story after story after story.

Craig: Weird.

John: Weird.

Craig: Very weird and influential, literally.

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John: Definitely. A great year for movies, a great year for television, and a great year to start a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. I thought, Craig, we might go back and answer our very first Scriptnotes question. I’ve not gotten to listen to our original answer, but Meredith has, so maybe we’ll answer the question again, and she’ll tell us what was different about the two answers.

Craig: That’s awesome.

Meredith: Yes. Your very first Scriptnotes question was sent in by Andrew. I’m assuming one of you pulled it from a blog, I’m guessing.

John: I think so. It probably came in from me or from you.

Meredith: What are execs looking for from working writers who come in and pitch takes on assignments? I’d love to hear more about this and what strategies are important. Do you pitch problems with the script and then solutions? Do you pitch your own version and how you do it from the beginning as though you’re pitching a new movie? Is it a conversation? What are they looking for?

John: What Andrew’s describing here sounds less like an open writing assignment and more like a rewrite job. Let’s have that be our premise. Craig, you’re going in for a meeting with an executive about a project. Talk to us about that conversation.

Craig: The overall goal would be, as always, to provide a grand sense of comfort that a doctor has arrived with a cure for your child’s disease. It is important to acknowledge what you think is wrong, but it’s equally important to not spend the whole time just beating up the script. I never talk about the prior writer. I just talk about the script and then talk about what is right, and then talk actively and passionately about what would make this sing. It’s all about really putting your chips behind what gets you excited, what you’re passionate for in a positive sense. If you can do all that and they agree with you, then yes, that should work.

John: Every bit of Craig’s advice there is flawless. What you’re doing is selling a positive vision of the movie rather than talking about the script as it currently stands. It’s important to acknowledge things that didn’t work or where you fell off the story, but it’s really about looking forward rather than looking back. You’re reminding them why it’s a good idea in the first place because likely what’s happened is they loved this at some point, and now they’ve fallen out of love with it. It’s getting them to re-spark to the idea and spark to your new vision. How to do it.

If they’re meeting with you, it’s because they think you might be the right person for it. Definitely try to continue with that momentum and find a good way to hook into what it is they’re going to love about it. I would also say listen. Listening is a crucial part of any meeting. If they are telling you what they’re not liking, make sure you’re not pitching some that reinforces the things they don’t like. Sometimes, even before you get into that meeting, you can get a read from your reps or from somebody else, this is what they’re concerned about, so you know where to steer the conversation early.

Craig: What if our answers from back then were the same answers word for word, that if you play them on top of each other, you wouldn’t be able to tell?

Meredith: I’m looking at the transcript right now. While they’re not word for word, I think your previous selves would very much agree with your current selves. You basically are saying the same thing: own the product, find the spark. John, you gave great advice. You said you should be able to talk about a movie like you’re talking to your friend, getting them excited to go see it.

John: Anything like this is essentially a pitch, and you’re pitching a positive vision of what this is going to be and why they should go watch this movie with you. All right, nothing has changed. We’ve not learned or grown in our wisdom at all.

Craig: Possibly not.

John: For some things that I just have the right answer, and that is just the right answer. If anyone has a different answer for that, they’re wrong.

Craig: In a way, what we can say now is that we’re right because back then, how long ago did we answer that question?

John: 15 years.

Craig: That was from Season 1, so to speak.

John: First episode.

Craig: First episode. Okay, great. 750 episodes ago, 749 episodes ago, 15 years ago, we said something. We’re saying it now, and we’ve done pretty well over the last 15 years. That means we’re right. Now we can actually start to say things like, we’re right. That’s not an opinion anymore. We’re just correct.

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John: All right, we have a new question here of which it seems very relevant to this quinceañera moment.

Meredith: Tom writes, I have a question regarding a feature film I’m working on. The story is a romantic drama that follows two people falling in and out of love over a 12-year period. What I’m struggling with is how to show the passing of time in interesting, cinematic, and visual ways without using title cards. Have you encountered this challenge in projects before, and how do you recommend going about it? Any thoughts, examples, ideas, or provocations would be massively helpful. Thank you for all you do.

John: All right. Passage of time, like we’re going through, obviously, people themselves change. Their faces change, their bodies change, their clothes change. I think the setting around you, the environment is probably one of the better ways of showing that time has passed here. I had to do this a lot in Big Fish because we’d visit the town of Spectre three different times. Each time we visited, it looks vastly different. It is this isolated town with no real road. Then it’s more of a proper town with an asphalt road going through the middle, and everything’s fixed up really nicely.

Then finally, we see it in ruins there at the end. If you actually were to visit the town now, which is on an island in a river in Alabama, the ruined version is what’s there now because that was the last thing we shot. That’s a case of the physical space has changed each time we’ve gotten there, and that is helpful for showing the passage of time. Other situations, you may, in an ongoing shot, show things changing around it. That’s the thing in the project I’m working on right now, where in a continuous shot, we see time happening to a place. You see it weathering and falling apart and things happening. I would say look at the setting around an area for one way to indicate that time is passing. Craig, what are your instincts?

Craig: First of all, I understand sometimes why people just don’t want to do subtitles, but you don’t have to be afraid of subtitles either. They are basic. They also do the job very, very quickly. If you have to do it repeatedly, this is where you start to almost need subtitles because it’s hard to just keep doing tricks repeatedly. You could pick something that grows like a tree that gets planted, and then every time you come back, it’s taller. Let’s say it’s two characters. This is a romance. It’s over 12 years. I don’t know if they move in together. I don’t know what happens, but let’s say one of them is always in the same place. One of them lives in a home, and that doesn’t change.

There’s a baby across the street, and then you see that baby’s a toddler, and then the baby’s a teenager. You can do these things to sort of go, oh, got it, passage of time in an interesting way that doesn’t involve subtitles or needle drops. When you think about Boogie Nights, they really went for needle drops. They went for music that actually helped move you along through years, and it worked really good in part because the ’70s and the ’80s, that music transition was so jarring and crazy and fit the thematic shift so much. Things that grow are helpful, but subtitles aren’t the end of the world.

John: They aren’t the end of the world. To speak as something that Craig fixates on often over the course of 15 years of the podcast, hair, makeup, and wardrobe, different eras, different styles, you can show us there, and we can get a sense of what that is. We know what ’70s clothes look like, ’80s clothes look like, ’90s clothes look like. That will help cue things in. If you need to anchor to a specific year or moment, if it’s not going to feel icky, you can do, like, I had a romantic comedy where we were scrolling back through someone’s Instagram grid, and you need to feel like, okay, how long have they been together?

You see, like, oh, these are the photos where they’re wearing masks, where this is the pandemic, so you get some sense of, okay, that’s how far back this was. That may be a useful thing for you to think about, too. I think the answer, though, is ultimately, it’s going to be specific to your movie. If the choice for your movie makes sense to put on subtitles or the little chyrons that show what year it is, great. If it doesn’t, then find some cinematic way that feels appropriate to your storytelling.

Craig: Yes, it should have some connection. Thinking about it now, Boogie Nights, I think Paul Thomas Anderson used both titles and wardrobe, hair, makeup, music to move us through the years, as I recall.

John: Ultimately, you may find, if you’re hopping back and forth between these periods, you’ll set different color schemes for the two things, too, so that we can just instinctively know that, okay, we’re in this time period, or in this time period based on, essentially, the lookup tables and just how the film looks. They’re just a different style for the different things. Some movies will go so far as to have different aspect ratios for the different times. Whatever works for your specific story, do that. Let’s try one more question.

Meredith: Charles writes, why does it take so bloody long to make a TV show or movie? I know every young punk probably thinks they can parachute in and cut some dead weight from the process and speed things up, but I get the feeling in this case, a lot of it might be necessarily slow. Where does the time go?

John: Oh, Craig, why can’t you make your show any faster? Why do you make us wait for things? It’s really a crime.

Craig: I could. The simplest answer is that as television has evolved and certain shows, marquee shows, are big productions, every episode is movie-esque. We shoot on a movie schedule. What we’re reacting to is the difference between the television we grew up with and the television that is occurring now. Television we grew up with was network television. It was 22 episodes a year. Those episodes routinely would shoot three or four days. That’s it. They could, because their scale was rather limited. When you watch a show like Ryan’s show or my show or any big production, we’re working on a movie schedule because we are trying to deliver something that has a movie size to it, even if it’s just one hour as opposed to two. We’re doing a lot of one hour.

The last of us will add up to four-ish movies over the course of the season, like this season. That means it takes a lot of time because takes time to prep a movie, takes time to shoot a movie, and takes time to put post-production. Visual effects are the other big driver. Visual effects, if your show has a lot of them, are labor-intensive and time-intensive. That’s really what it comes down to is people are like, well, why does it take so long to make an Avengers movie? Everybody gets it. It takes time. If it takes two years to make a two-hour Avengers movie, the fact that it takes two years to make a 9 or 10-hour season of television, it shouldn’t be to the detriment of how we view television.
If anything, we’re moving faster than one would imagine, but that’s the answer.

John: We recently had two other creators of Hacks come on the show talking about making Hacks. One of the things I love about Hacks is there was a new season every year. Unlike shows that take all this time off, I asked them, how are you doing this? They’re like, we just work constantly. We just basically finish a season, then we’re starting a new season immediately. It’s more like how we used to make traditional shows, except that rather than making 22 episodes per season, they’re making 8 to 10 episodes per season. They’re making it in a movie quality, so they’re a little bit shorter. They’re just continuously working.

They never took a vacation. They never had a break. They were just on the cycle, keep going. They were delighted to be doing it, but it was just the grind of doing that. These bigger shows, Craig, you’re often doing one thing at a time. Obviously, you’re doing some writing at the start. You’re going into production. You’re doing editing while you’re writing, but then you’re finishing editing and visual effects at the end. Then you’re done, and then you have to start the next season.

Craig: How much time do you think goes between done and start the next season? I’m curious. How much time do you think happens?

John: Two or three weeks.

Craig: Two weeks. That’s what I get, two weeks. The reason that Hacks can be yearly is because their show is much easier to shoot because they’re half an hour, right?

John: Yes, they’re longer than half an hour off, but yes. They’re more like a half an hour. They feel like a half an hour, yes. Our show’s twice as long. You also have zombies.

Craig: Yes, they’re a comedy about real human beings, and it’s way easier to shoot. When we have days that are like that, we shoot at the same speed I would imagine they shoot, which is we could do four or five pages of dialogue if it’s two people talking. No problem. Then we have scenes where a hoard of creatures attacks a defended enclave. That’s the problem.

John: As opposed to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which also had big fight scenes and all these kind of things, but the standards of what it was trying to achieve cinematically were lower for good reason.

Craig: Yes. Their schedule compressed everything. They understood there were certain things they were able to achieve with the money they had and the time they had. Really, money is just time. Time is the resource. How much time does it take to shoot something up to a standard? Veep is an incredible, legendary show. I don’t know how long it would take them to shoot an episode of Veep, but when you’re talking about working with your theater troupe, pretty much on standing sets. We’re in the situation room. We’re in the Oval Office. We’re in our apartment. We’re outside in this one spot. Even that, you’ve just eliminated an enormous amount of prep.

The amount of prep time it takes to find new locations, build new sets, cast new actors, it’s enormous. Again, that’s the kind of thing that ultimately creates these huge delays. When I look at what some of these big shows do, the one that really blew– Fallout, they actually were quite fast. I want to talk to them about this because I think some of it may have to do with some of their methods of shooting. Even then, I don’t know what the time was between Fallout Season 1 and Season 2. I actually I want to look it up right now.

John: I think it’s faster than a lot of these shows. Also, my hunch is that they were shooting multiple units. It’s logistically a nightmare, but actually can get things done more quickly.

Craig: Which we also do. Fallout Season 2 was December 16th, 2025. Fallout Season 1 was April 2024. It was like a year and three quarters, something like that. It was not that fast. It’s not possible to do these things that fast. It just isn’t. I know it’s frustrating for people. I think it’s frustrating for everybody. On the other hand, it is what it is. There’s just no way to get there. Believe me, if we could do it faster, we would do it faster. I’ve been thinking a lot about Baldur’s Gate and how to get back to the way Game of Thrones functioned because that to me was a great balance.

They figured out, at least for the first, they started. You could see how then as they got to the end and things got bigger, they began moving towards the model that we have now. Let’s call it the first five seasons of Game of Thrones, they were able to turn that around on a yearly basis, which is mind-blowing. I want to get back to that somehow if I can.

John: I think we’ve probably talked about all 15 years of the show is that I remember when House of Cards came out where all the episodes dropped at once, but Game of Thrones, yes, it was only every year, but it took 10 weeks, 12 weeks to watch that first season. It just had a bigger footprint. It was more time, it was less time off the air, and it just stuck around a little bit longer.

Craig: We, for our show, the last visual effects have to be dropped in roughly, I think, five weeks before air date. That means if we have nine episodes, while the first four episodes are airing, we’re still finishing the show. It’s scary.

John: Let’s talk about our own show for a second in terms of why things can turn around more quickly or can’t turn around more quickly. Some of the stuff you’re describing for The Last of Us also applies to Scriptnotes. Our standards have also just gotten higher. If you went back and listened to that first thing we were recording, it was John editing this. The audio didn’t sound so great. People were more forgiving of it back in its time. I remember Aline commenting, oh, your audio sounds so much better than a lot of other podcasts. We did care. We got better as it went along, but it wasn’t great. The standards weren’t so high.

It was much more Buffy the Vampire Slayer than The Last of Us in those moments. Now that we’re shooting video, there is more prep time. There’s more post time. We need Meredith and Lauren to help get the things running right, partly because you and I are just so much busier than we used to be.

Craig: We still do have our roots and whatever. Let’s stretch our analogy. When we started, we were like the network television version of a podcast. It was pretty simple. It was a fast turnaround, low footprint, and all that. As time goes on, not only do we want it to sound better, or work better. Other podcasts, the podcast world around us has become more and more like everybody’s a CBS News bureau. Now every podcast seems to have that one dark room with the rectangle table. We can be sort of an old throwback-y relic. Also, we have to keep up a little bit with the trends around us. That makes sense.

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John: All right. It’s time for our one cool thing. My one cool thing fits in very nicely with this nostalgia. This is a playlist created by Danny Carney. Drew Marquardt, our former producer, sent this through on the Slack. I think it’s just delightful. He says, my friend, Danny made a playlist of songs you’d hear buying cold medicine with your mom at Walgreens between 1988 and 1992. It’s so accurate, you feel like you ate nine Cadbury eggs waiting for the prescription to fill.

Craig: Wow.

John: I think it’s dead on. We’re looking at the list of songs here, Craig. I’m kidding because it’s not only songs that came out during this time, it’s the songs that we’ll be playing because the present moment is really just the recent past.

Craig: Yes. In a place like Walgreens, it’s always looking backwards to some extent. They’re not playing current hits really. Take it on the run by REO Speedwagon is just perfect for that because that really is back eight years earlier than this or nine, and that’s about right.

John: I can absolutely hear Against All Odds by Phil Collins. I can hear it playing on the speakers overhead.

Craig: Oh, yes. Baker Street by Jerry Rafferty. That’s, by the way, awesome song. Awesome song. Oh my God, look at some of these. Yes, for sure. Caribbean Queen.

John: During our D&D games every week, Craig and other people will constantly refer back to music that they love or will play songs they love. Weirdly, I’ve not heard of 90% of them. It’s so funny how people have specific memories of songs and things, and there’s things I’ve missed out on. This list, I definitely recognize some things.

Craig: We all know this list, too. We play with Tom Morello, so there’s always going to be some deep cuts on the rock end. A couple of weeks ago, we went down a pretty serious rush hole. It was like we were playing 2112, which, by the way, is the worst way to introduce somebody to Rush. Listen to Tom Sawyer. That’s a great way to start. Yes, we can get pretty crunchy on that stuff. Phil Hay is also very, he loves a deep cut in rock.

John: Yes. Craig, what do you have for us?

Craig: This was an article that I read. It was a review in a magazine called Literary Review. It’s a review of a book called First Blossom in the Orchard: Earliest stories, novellas, humoresques, 1880 to 1882 by Anton Chekhov. It’s a gathering up of early Chekhov before he starts getting, as this reviewer, I believe this is John Stokes, is reviewing here. Before Anton Chekhov starts writing the things that he’s famous for, so this is before Cherry Orchard and his heavy relationship dramas, he’s writing stuff. This is what I just thought this was. I’m not even sure that this is a cool thing as much as a curious thing.

He’s trying to contextualize Chekhov’s early work in a way that’s meaningful and revisionist because what his early work looks like is sort of a bunch of crap. It’s like what they’re kind of implying. It says, this is often attributed to the pen name Anton Chekhov, which I guess is what he was going by then. The pieces are extremely varied in kinds, satirical squibs, tenuously romantic novellas, dramatic skits and sketches, spoofs based on newspaper features. With hindsight, it would be easy to label this as apprentice work, but that would be to miss its significance at the time.

I was reading this going, wait, that’s sort of what I did. Then it occurred to me, okay, yes, I think what happens sometimes with literary theorists or critics is that they are looking for this grand design to things. Without knowing, I’m just going to go out on a limb here and say, he needed the work. He needed the work. This is what people were hiring to do. This is who would publish him. This was part also of what he liked. As he grew up, he sort of changed his interest in things. It is fascinating how, even for somebody who’s understood universally, to be a literary genius, people who critique are like, but how do we make sense of the parts of this that were just funny?

That’s also part of it. That’s part of it. It doesn’t have to be viewed necessarily as some sort of like, but why? Anyway, I don’t mean to imply that this is fully dismissive of that, but it is interesting to watch non-writers wrestle with the notion of writers changing because they don’t understand. Anyway, it’s fascinating. Worth taking a look and see what people might think.

John: Craig, the first things you wrote, how many of those are still around? How many of those things can you find? One of the things we’ve been doing as we’ve been trying to clean up johnaugust.com, the blog, is I’m finding all of these old blog posts I did, and it’s like, oh, that’s actually a really good post. It reads like my voice, but I don’t remember writing it, which is great and exciting. At the same time, if I were a critic going through this stuff, I might ascribe intention to things that I really didn’t have because it was just what I was writing at that day.

Likewise, the first things I was hired to write, How to Read Fried Worms for Imagine, I think it probably reads fine, but is it a good reflection of who I am as a writer and what my goals were? No, it was a job I could get. It’s that balance. How about for you? How much of your early work do you still see or could you find?

Craig: I have all of it. Going back to the very first things, and I can’t open those documents. We had talked a little bit about how there’s some universal way to maybe open some of these things because they’re from ancient applications. Yes, I’ve got it all. I’ve got it all. Some of these things I don’t even recognize having done. I’ve forgotten about them. Once I look at them, then I’m like, oh, yes, that’s right. Man.

John: The first things I wrote in high school were on our old Atari, our old Atari 800. I don’t have the discs for those anymore. I don’t have the files for those. There’s a bunch of my high school writing is just lost forever.

Craig: Oh, that’s gone. Yes, I don’t have that.

John: I would love to see some of that. I have some of the stuff I wrote for the newspapers there, but that’s not really my writing in a meaningful way. It’s not until college that I have some stuff that is recognizable as my writing. It’s early, and it’s imitative, and I was trying to write in the voice of Spy Magazine. I was trying to find out how I write things.

Craig: Yes, it’s funny. Also, I’m not very big on nostalgia. I’m such a look forward person. I never actually looked through this. As I look through this crazy list of stuff over the years, I don’t want to go back and read any of it.

John: That’s also very good. There’s a script as we were moving stuff onto the server that I read, and it’s like, the writing is good. The words on a page are good. The storytelling is messy, but I recognize like, oh, I completely pilfered for this for this other project. I could see like, oh, I took that idea and raised another thing, and appropriate. That’s not plagiarism. That’s your own stuff.

Craig: Yes, self-thievery.

John: Self-thievery. All right, that is our show for this week. It is produced by Meredith Stedman and edited by Matthew Chilelli, with lots of help from Lauren Loesberg. Our outro this week is by Matthew Chilelli, our editor. If you have an outro, you can send a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.
The Scriptnotes book is available wherever you buy books. Craig, 15 years ago, we did not know there would be a Scriptnotes book.

Craig: No.

John: No, we barely knew that this was going to be called Scriptnotes.

Craig: Or that we would be doing it after four months.

John: Yes, it’s wild. You can find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You’ll find us on Instagram at Scriptnotes Podcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes with links to things we talked about today. In the email, you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you again to our premium subscribers. That’s a thing we didn’t have 15 years ago.

Craig: Sure didn’t.

John: We had a few hundred and a few thousand people listening to us. Now we have some folks paying us money each month. That is why we have producers and coordinators and editors. God bless that.

Craig: God bless them. How many people do listen to us a month here at our 15th anniversary?

John: Meredith, do you have a sense?

Meredith: You’re getting tens of thousands per episode, per week. Per month, it would be higher.

John: Yes.

Craig: All right. Then I guess we’ll keep going.

John: We’re still bigger than Bon Jovi, Craig, which I know was your benchmark back in the day.

Craig: We are the Bon Jovi of podcast. I would never say bigger.

John: All right. You can sign up to become a premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net where you get all those back episodes. Back to Episode 1 if you’d like, and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on our predictions for 15 years from now in 2041. Craig, Meredith, Lauren, thank you so much for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you.

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John: Craig, it is now 2041. We have moved 15 years into the future. Let us think about where we are, what’s happened. You and I would be roughly 70 years old at this point.

Craig: 70.

John: 70, but that’s only slightly older than the median age of a senator. We’re still viable. We’re still–

Craig: Are we?

John: Who knows. I don’t want to establish that as the premise. Please, are we viable at 70 years old to be recording this podcast? I think we’re both pretty healthy.

Craig: Yes, I think so. I hope so. I hope we’re healthy enough at least to talk. That would be great, but you never know. Are we still working?

John: That’s a great question. I have no intention of ever retiring. I think we’ve said over the course of this podcast that you don’t really retire. They just tell you, okay, we’re done with you.

Craig: They just ask you to leave, which is fine.

John: My brother is retiring. My brother is retiring this month. He’s only four years older than me, but he’s retiring, but he’s got a normal job.

Craig: Normal people who do normal jobs retire. We don’t retire. We get into the job because we’re unwell.

John: That’s true.

Craig: It makes sense.

John: A desire to create things and tell stories and wrangle difficult people into doing things that we want to do. Shall we presume that we are, if not still working, still curious about the industry around us and what that’s like? Let’s envision what this world would be like. I’m going to say that I think there are still going to be things like movies and television. Would the actual industry have changed? Probably. Will there still be two-hour pieces of entertainment that add the shape of a movie? I think there will be. Do I think there will be ongoing series between a half an hour and an hour long? Yes, I think there will be.

Craig: Oh, yes. Considering that there has always been this, I think yes. I don’t think that’s changing. If anything, we talked earlier about things like New Girl and how our kids go back and rewatch the things that proceed us in the ’90s and 2000s and 2010s. They clearly like it, and they will be conditioned to want more of it. It’s not like those formats were imposed upon people. They came out of people because that’s roughly how we naturally like it.

John: Even if new formats do come about, so something like the micro dramas, the verticals that we’ve talked about this last year on the show, I can envision there are something like that, a better version that exists out there. It doesn’t eliminate old formats. We still have plays. We still have operas. We still have all those things. I’m trying to actually think of an example of a format that just completely went away.

Craig: Radio drama.

John: Radio drama, sure. There are podcasty versions of that. It’s different. Radio soap operas have gone away. The Phantom.

Craig: The detective stories in The Phantom and all that stuff. That went away, but radio in general has gone away. Radio has basically been destroyed. There’s still FM radio, but like–

John: Well, I think I’m trying to distinguish between the medium and the format. The format still exists. Podcasts took a lot of the space of what used to be radio, which is just like it’s blocks of things that you’re listening to. Although we recently had a guest on the show who was talking about how she loves radio, and she was just like, this is a radio station I listen to.

Craig: It feels very performative. I get that some people love vinyl and it’s cool, but podcasts devoured talk radio and streaming Spotify and Apple Music destroyed radio and music radio. It’s terrestrial radio, as they call it, and basically been eliminated. Television, the delivery systems, the size of the TVs, I think you’re going to see a lot more. Televisions are going to get bigger and bigger, but I don’t think that that’s going to change.

John: Something that 15 years ago, as we were starting to record this podcast, someone could bring up, it’s like, well, what about goggles? What about VR? What about you’re watching stuff on goggles rather than watching a big screen in your house? So far, that hasn’t come to pass. I have sitting here next to me the Apple version of this, the Apple Vision Pro. It’s like–

Craig: Oh, you’re the guy that bought the Apple Vision Pro?

John: I’m the guy. I’m the guy.

Craig: You’re their one sale?

John: I’m their one sale. It genuinely is impressive when you’re watching things. I just never put it on. It never occurs to me to use it.

Craig: Because it’s annoying. Yes, people do watch things on their phone, which is annoying, but an iPad is a perfectly good way to watch something. There’s just something so weird about having things on your face. I think, really, it just comes down to things on your face that’s weird. Also, we don’t want to be in the movie. We want to watch it.

John: Yes. Well, let’s talk about that idea of interactivity. Because as we were starting to record this podcast 15 years ago, we were probably still in the era of CD-ROMs and interactive media like that. I think the lesson we’ve needed to learn is that people don’t want control over that kind of stuff. They want to be told a story rather than having to control every bit of a story. While people love video games where they can just have some narrative control, some of the most successful games limit your choices a lot like that.
There are open sandbox games, open world games where you can do anything, the Grand Theft Autos. There’s The Last of Us where your choices are more constrained, and I think they’re successful because they are more constrained because story relies on some constraints.

Craig: You have no choices. That’s the truth. In the game, you don’t have choices. The moments that happen that are decision moments are cutscenes. Whereas in Baldur’s Gate, you have a billion choices you can make. Part of the fun of the game is its replayability because there are so many characters with so many different ways that their narratives can go. That’s a very different kind of thing. We like the idea of iterative fiction and stuff like that, but for a traditional movie or television experience, we don’t want that thing where people in the theater can all press a button and vote to see what happens next. Nobody wants this.

John: Yes, we’ve done the experiments, and the results are pretty consistently clear. I think we have not talked a lot about on the 15 years of the podcast is creators who are creating stuff and releasing it directly to their audience. YouTubers, we’ve had a Curry Barker on the show, which was great. He was a person who was doing a lot of stuff and directly interacting with his fans. In his role doing that, he didn’t have the kinds of protections and frameworks that you and I’ve had as Writers Guild members this whole time.
There was a sense of, it’s just a different economic model than what we’re used to. Jumping ahead to 2041, what are the range of options for the creator economy? What do you see?

Craig: I think those are going to expand dramatically. We’ve talked about this before, that big studios are banks/advertising agencies. That’s what they are. Their stranglehold over distribution has been pretty permanent in terms of films and theaters. I do think we are going to see more artist-driven platforms. When somebody gets a fan base that is dramatic, the truth is, they don’t need a studio. What is a studio? A studio will say, we’ve got a Christopher Nolan picture. It’s called The Odyssey. We’re going to advertise it. It’s going to cost this much money to make and this much money to advertise. Then it goes into theaters.

If Christopher Nolan had wanted, he probably did because it’s a lot of work, but if he had wanted to just make a company called Nolan Pictures that’s its own studio, he could have gotten that money. He could have gotten money for both the making of and the advertising. He would have been exposed financially if it had been a disaster, no question. At some point, if you’ve got an audience who feels pretty built in a sense, it’s what Jason Blum did with Blumhouse. He’s doing that. You can do that. Then you just lean on the system for purely just distribution or stuff like that. I do think this is going to happen more and more.

John: I look at the creator economy and there’s basically two elements that are combined for them. In ours, we have the financing, we have the distribution, and then we have the exhibition. The distribution and exhibition for these creators is really one thing. Either it’s YouTube or it’s Instagram or it’s TikTok, and that’s the joint thing there. When I see creators trying to unionize or otherwise form protections for themselves, I don’t think it’s a natural fit. I don’t think it’s a perfect analogy because they’re not employees of these companies the same way that you and I are employees of the studios who hire us.

I think it’s going to be an ongoing fight. I think over the next 15 years, we’re going to see stuff shake out about this because there’s always gatekeepers. There’s always people who say, who give you permission or don’t give you permission, and there’s ways to do end runs around them, but there’s pitfalls and downsides of trying to do an end run around those gatekeepers.

Craig: I think the future will, on balance, be more challenging for unions in our town than maybe supportive or favorable. It’s going to be harder.

John: Because there’s the ability to make things that resemble our television shows, our movies outside of that system because the costs of production are lower because there’s different ways to do things. We see this right now happening with talk shows where there are video podcasts that are a lot like a talk show but don’t have to go through the normal distribution channels, and therefore, some of them are not covered by union protections the way they would otherwise be. That’s going to be a fight.

Craig: It is. Unions are organized around a labor force as it was defined by what it was and no longer is. So much of what labor unions are trying to do is support and protect a workforce that is shifting under the union’s feet dramatically. The nature of what the jobs even are shifting dramatically, and that’s going to be a challenge.

John: I do think that in 2041, the advice we’ve given up to 2026 will largely still apply. The underlying aspects of what story is, what the personality, things you need to do, some of the specifics of how the business works may be different, but the general principles of it are going to be very much the same. We have an episode about general meetings. There are going to be general meetings in 2041 just like there were in 2011 when we started this podcast.

Craig: Yes, and we are correct. I think that’s what we’ve figured out is that we’re right. People should listen to us because we’re correct.

John: Yes. What I hope in 2041 is that I think a thing we’ve done well over 15 years is bring in new people to talk to who are doing the stuff now and younger writers who are just doing things in spaces that we just don’t know about. I think we have to keep doing that or else we’re going to be a couple dinosaurs talking about a lost era that has passed us by.

Craig: Everybody is going to be younger than us. The only people that will be older than us will be people that are in hospice care.

John: Right now, I think our listenership in general is just a little bit younger than us, but it’s going to be significantly younger than us by the time we get to 2041.

Craig: Because, yes, our audience is going to die. We’re getting older. We’re getting older. 15 years have gone by. Think of how young our kids were. It’s crazy.

John: They were babies, yes.

Craig: They were kids.

John: They were kids. I said six, yes.

Craig: My oldest was nine. It’s crazy.

John: Now we could be grandparents.

Craig: You know what? Let’s all sing Sunrise, Sunset from Fiddler on the Roof.

John: So good. No, we’d have to get the rights for it.

Craig: Oh, right. That’s fair.

John: Craig, it’s been fun doing 15 years of the podcast. I hope we get to do 15 more.

Craig: To 15 years.

John: All right. Thanks, all.