The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: Okay. My name is Craig Mazin.
John: You’re listening to Episode 718 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, you may have heard us discuss industry euphemisms, but really, no worries if not. At the end of the day, we’re bumping this just in case you got buried. Whether you’re coming up for air after the holidays or just getting your ducks in a row, we want to be respectful of everyone’s time as we discuss stock phrases that are endemic to Hollywood. We’ll also run down the numbers on Scriptnotes, both the podcast and the book. We’ll answer listener questions, including what’s the deal with video podcasts?
Craig: What is the deal?
John: In our bonus segment for premium members, how do you deal with a difficult collaborator? We’ll talk about that. We have no experience. In theory, what would it be like to deal with a difficult collaborator, Craig? In theory, in theory.
Craig: No, it’s entirely theoretical.
John: It’s all entirely theoretical. This episode, we’re recording on December 14th, but it’s coming out enough later that there was news, but the news is going to be so outdated by the time we actually air this episode. Disney made a deal with OpenAI to license characters and give OpenAI $1 billion.
Craig: Yes, notice that.
John: Notice that. Paramount is now doing a hostile bid for Warner Bros. We don’t know how this is all going to sort out.
Craig: That won’t have changed by the time this episode comes out. That’s going to take a while, yes.
John: It’s going to take a while. Everything’s going to take a while.
Craig: Everything will take some time.
John: Yes, I’m not delighted by any of this news, frankly.
Craig: No. In general, we don’t want fewer entities that pay for our work, but it’s happening.
John: It’s happening. On the whole, I’m not excited by companies that distribute our product, making deals with AI companies to train models on our stuff. Don’t love that.
Craig: I really don’t like that. It’s interesting. I was reading about this. Disney, I think, probably is looking and saying, “Hey, people are going to be using this to take Iron Man and do stuff. We want to just get paid for it. What we’ll do is we’ll just let you have Iron Man.” It’s a little bit like the music industry saying to Spotify, “Okay, we’ll let you have it if you just give us $0.04 a track.” That feels like what’s going on here.
Now, one thing that I thought was amusing was Disney said, and OpenAI said, that there will be, of course, restrictions on the kinds of things you can do with their characters. No, there won’t. No, there won’t. People are going to get around that, and there’s going to be some pretty messed up Rule 34-type stuff out there. That’s just inevitable.
John: Inevitably, like the non-licensed versions, that stuff that’s not on Sora, there’s going to be wild stuff that’s happening there, too. I can understand if Disney wants to have some sort of walled garden where they can theoretically control a little bit of it all, but I just don’t think it’s great for the business at all. I think it’s too early in this process for people to start making these giant deals on their licensed characters. It’s the fact that OpenAI and these companies already stole a bunch of this stuff and adjusted it, and we’re spitting stuff out.
It’s complicated, and we won’t get into it today. Instead, we’ll do some actual follow-up on something we have a definitive answer on, which was way back in Episode 620, we talked about this producer named Carl Rinsch.
Craig: Oh, my God, Carl Rinsch. I remember this guy.
John: Yes. Basically, he was a filmmaker who had done other movies beforehand, and basically was making a movie for Netflix, and basically kept asking for more money and more money and more money. Sorry, it was a series, not a movie. We talked about this guy who was just like, they were now suing him for all this money they’d taken from Netflix without actually delivering a movie. Now, there was a verdict. Drew, talk us through what we learned.
Craig: Yes. I assume the verdict is true.
Drew Marquardt: He’s guilty-
Craig: Of course, he’s guilty. Of course.
Drew: -for scamming Netflix out of over $11 million over this series, and he faces up to 90 years behind bars.
Craig: Oh, my God. [laughs]
John: He won’t serve 90 years.
[laughter]
John: That’s crazy.
Craig: I don’t know how old this guy is, but he’s probably, what, 40 or something? 45?
Drew: Probably somewhere in there.
Craig: I just like the idea of this dude being that 90-year-old in prison, and people are like, “This guy’s been here forever. Why?”
John: He must have done something absolutely horrendous. He took a bunch of money from Netflix.
Craig: Yes, he just didn’t– he did not do–
John: He didn’t deliver.
Craig: He didn’t deliver on a series. [chuckles] What do we think he’s going to serve? Two years? One?
John: Yes, it’s tough. Trump can’t commute this because it is a civil suit.
Craig: Well, is this something that was on his radar? [laughs]
John: No, but things are often not on his radar. He’s often trying to pardon people he has no ability to pardon, so we’ll see. It’ll be much less than that. He did a bad thing. You should pay money if you did a bad thing.
Craig: The last time somebody with a name like Carl Rinsch was sentenced to 90 years, it was at the Nuremberg trials.
[laughter]
Craig: This guy’s got the most German name. Carl Rinsch.
John: Carl Rinsch.
Craig: Yes, Carl Rinsch. You shouldn’t have done that, Carl. I don’t know what to say. It’s not like Netflix is going to miss that money or anything, but you can’t do that.
John: You can’t do that. No, it’s bad. I guess the interesting angle on this story is every producer, every filmmaker is selling smoke for a long time. It’s that delusional ability to say, “Oh, no, this is really going to happen.” You respect that. That’s the chutzpah. That’s the ability to hustle and get things made. You cross a line at some point. Where is that line is an interesting thing to explore.
Craig: I think the general magic trick is to get somebody to give you money. All the tricks are there. Once the money comes, then if you are a producer, you have to then mush everybody together to get the next thing, to get the script, to get the green light. If you do nothing, which is not normal, [chuckles] then you go to prison, apparently, or give the money back. I don’t know.
John: Famously, the producers is about that. That’s the funny comedy version of this is this was not a comedy, apparently. You can imagine the comedy version of this.
Craig: Even the producers put a show on.
John: They did. They put on a show.
Craig: They just wanted it to be a failure. This guy didn’t even do that. He apparently–
John: He represented himself, which is always–
Craig: Oh, no.
John: That’s also the comedy.
Craig: Our good friend, Ken White, who is a former federal prosecutor, now a defense attorney, shows up on all sorts of podcasts and things.
John: He came on our show to talk through legal stuff.
Craig: Exactly. There are a couple of things that just make his eyes roll in the back of his head in anger. One of them is people representing themselves. His feeling is like 90% of the lawyers you get can barely represent you. [laughs] You need a good lawyer.
John: A doctor shouldn’t perform surgery on himself either.
Craig: No, no.
John: You hear stories of the doctor who was isolated in Antarctica that had to do surgery to himself. That’s why it’s so rare because there’s talented people around you who should do that.
Craig: This guy isn’t even a doctor. This is a patient doing surgery on himself. [chuckles] It’s just idiotic. Don’t do that. No pro se, please.
John: No. We have two bits of feedback and follow-up on the Scriptnotes book, including a mistake that we made that none of our many readers caught that made it through into the book. What did Anthony say?
Drew: Anthony said, “Loving the book, such a wonderful distillation of your show. This is such a silly quibble. I almost didn’t send it, but as a lifelong Trekkie, I couldn’t let it go. On page 32, in the section at the bottom titled, Does This Story Travel or Stay Put, you illustrate your point with several iconic sets around which several popular shows are anchored. For Star Trek, however, you call it the ‘deck’ when it should more accurately read the ‘bridge’ of the Starship Enterprise in Star Trek.”
Craig: Oh, yes. The Enterprise does have decks, but that space is the bridge.
John: It’s the bridge, absolutely.
Craig: Well, I don’t know about you, John, but I think it’s time to end it all. That is so embarrassing that we need to just–
John: We need to call back every issue-
Craig: Or die.
John: -or every volume that has been sold of the Scriptnotes book, and just bring it back.
Craig: Hey, second edition, right?
John: There will be a second edition at some point. We can probably fix that in the second edition. What I’ll say is that if you have the book in front of you, flip to page 32. Please carefully cross out the word “deck,” write in “bridge,” and then at least you fixed your one personal copy.
Craig: Anthony, I appreciate this. You’re absolutely right. The good news is people who love Star Trek are notoriously flexible. These things–
John: Yes, absolutely.
Craig: Anthony is the nicest person in the world, by the way, because I feel like 90% of people would have just thrown the book across the room in anger. Thank you, Anthony, and we’re sorry.
John: It has sharp corners. It’s not that heavy, but it has sharp corners. You could have hurt somebody.
Craig: Oh, absolutely.
John: Another bit of follow-up from Charles.
Drew: “I heard Craig speculate that the new Scriptnotes book is maybe the only book that exists about how to write screenplays for movies or TV that is written by two people or a person who’s repeatedly done that job for decades. While he’s correct that most are by people who have never repeatedly held the job, there is a book on screenwriting written by not one, but two people who have repeatedly done the job for decades. Might I bring your attention to Writing Movies for Fun and Profit: How We Made a Billion Dollars at the Box Office and You Can, Too! by Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant.”
Craig: Absolutely right. Lennon and Garant are great.
John: Yes, they’re really lovely people.
Craig: That’s true. I forgot. I forgot. It’s a great book, though. That’s a really funny book, too. It’s different.
John: It’s a very different book.
Craig: It’s a very different book, but it’s very funny. Everything that–
John: It’s much more memoir-y than ours is.
Craig: Yes, but those guys are hysterical. Love those guys. That’s awesome.
John: Cool. All right. Let’s move on to our marquee topic. This was suggested by none other than Megana Rao.
Craig: Then it’s going to be good.
John: Our beloved producer from the past. The framing for this is sometimes in Hollywood, in this industry, you say a thing that covers over for what you actually want. It’s a euphemism or it’s a stock phrase that everyone knows the meaning of, but it gets away from saying the actual harder thing that you don’t want to say. Megana’s first suggestion for this was, “No worries if not,” which is a thing you say in an email which gives the other person out because it’s the end, so you don’t come across as too demanding.
Craig: It’s not passive-aggressive. It’s just–
John: It’s just submissive. It’s like a dog rolling over on your back.
Craig: It’s weasel-wording because “yes worries if not,” really. Yes worries. Why would I have asked you? “Yes worries if not,” it’s actually a very useful phrase if you’re asking somebody that works for you to not come off as too pushy about something. They understand if you’re asking for it and you do it. “No worries if not” is a nice way of just saying, “But I’m nice.” [chuckles]
John: I probably used versions of this for something with Drew saying, “This would be my preference, but if the other thing happened, that’s also okay.”
Craig: That is much clearer than this. This is, yes, “No worries if not” is, “I worry.” I immediately start worrying if someone tells me to not worry.
John: “No worries at all,” I think, is an Australian phrase that came over to California. The “no worries if not” probably is a morphed version of that, which is a specialized version. Drew, I proposed this to you on Thursday or Friday, and then you came up with a whole list of– I think you crowdsourced from your friends, a whole list of these industry terms.
Craig: Fantastic.
John: Drew, if you could read us the term, and then we’ll have a little discussion about what it actually really means and what the use of it is.
Drew: We’re playing phone tag.
John: Yes. Sometimes you’re just actually calling what it is. Basically, we keep going back and forth, but also there’s sometimes a little bit of a password. I feel like, I think you’re dodging me or there’s a reason why we’re not connecting here. Because we’re playing phone tag, I’m now just going to tell you in an email what it is I actually want.
Craig: I only use we’re playing phone tag so that the other person knows that I called them back because sometimes I just wonder, okay, I get a call from somebody, I miss it. I call them back, they miss it. They call me the next day, I miss it. Now, I’m like, “Did they know, or is this a second call because somebody didn’t tell them?”
John: Sometimes you forget like, “Did I initiate this? Did they initiate this? Did you already have your answer?”
Craig: I just want them to know I was trying. That’s all. I tried.
John: Next up.
Drew: “Bumping this.” These first ones are for emails, so “bumping this.”
Craig: “Bumping this.”
John: I had to do a “bumping this” this week when I’ve not gotten a response back on a thing, and I do need a response, and so, like, “Hey, bumping this because I need to know this thing.”
Craig: Bump has become this multi-purpose word. It wasn’t around when I started, but then somewhere along the line, this “bumped me” became a thing in notes, like meaning I was reading, and then, suddenly, I was jarred and did not like something or did not understand something. It bumped me. Then “bumping this” also became– I think it might come from programming or something, like bumping something.
John: Like push and pop. It’s like if we’re at the top of the stack.
Craig: Exactly. You’re bumping the stack. This then became like, “I’m bumping this,” and I will get bumping this– I receive bumps constantly like just, “Remember the thing?” It’s actually a nice way of saying, “You never answered my question.”
John: Which is related to the next euphemism here.
Drew: “In case this got buried.”
[laughter]
John: There’s a little more passive-aggressive about that. It’s like, “Here’s the thing you didn’t see.” Actually, though, just today, Craig and I, you had an exchange. You’d send a long email with stuff for the next D&D campaign. Had I actually read the email fully and carefully, I wouldn’t have made the mistake that I made.
Craig: You know what? It got buried. [laughs] No, but that’s why “in case this got buried” is definitely passive-aggressive. That is just saying, “Oh, I’m sure you have so many emails, but–”
John: What’s fascinating about it is it’s passive-aggressive, but it’s also giving them an out.
Craig: That’s the passive part.
John: That is the passive part, yes.
Craig: Yes, but it’s aggressive.
John: Yes.
Drew: “Got caught in my outbox.”
Craig: Oh, please. I’ve never heard that one. If I ever do, I’ll be like, “Oh, please.”
John: This has happened to me once or twice in real life where it’s like, I see a draft that I actually just never sent. I did reply to them, and I realized like, “Oh, no, it actually never went through because it’s just how stuff got threaded.”
Craig: I would believe, I guess, if somebody phrased it as, “I literally never hit send.” It’s been the emails behind a window, another thing. I would get that “caught in my outbox” sounds a little fishy.
Drew: “Coming up for air” after Sundance, holidays, whatever.
Craig: Yes, “coming up for air.” I use that one constantly. Constantly. “I’ll be coming up for air.” When did that start? I don’t even know.
John: I don’t know. I’m sure we could do a Google Ngram search for when stuff actually started appearing in texts. It’s related to a concept of submarining for me, which is submarining where you just immerse yourself so completely in a project, in a relationship, or whatever. It’s just like you just disappeared off the face of the earth. You do come back up for like, “Oh, wow, the rest of the world is still out there. I haven’t dealt with all these things.”
Craig: Yes, there are these times where you are plunged into some process. Sometimes it’s production, but sometimes you’re doing promotion stuff or you’re writing a draft. You have to just focus on that thing, but you tell somebody, “At this time, I’ll be coming up for air, and then we can sit down. It’s just not a great time now because I’m stuck doing all this stuff.” That’s a perfectly fine euphemism. It’s not even a euphemism.
John: It’s a stock phrase. It’s a thingy.
Craig: Yes, it’s a stock phrase, yes.
John: I remember, I think back when I was in Stark. I was interning for somebody, and another friend was interning someplace. We’re talking about this filmmaker who said, “Oh, I won’t be able to do any of that stuff because I’ll be doing award season promotion stuff.” I’m like, “Really? You really think you’re going to be busy doing that?”
Craig: It’s presumptuous.
John: It’s presumptuous, yes. That filmmaker was actually correct, and I just had no sense of, like, “Oh, you’re going to lose multiple weeks just doing that promotional stuff.”
Craig: It’s insane. It’s a job. It’s a job. Oh, boy. I can’t say that I enjoy the job, but I’m not supposed to. The actors, I think, are better at it. Also, just more people want to talk to them because they’re actors, and it’s fun, and they have more practice with it. It does blow my mind how busy it is. I am often reminded by the women that I work with that it is busier for them because these events, like hair and makeup, which I always– There’s a lovely woman named Sue, who does my makeup for these things. That means just take the massive shine off his bald head and try and help his eye bags a little. It’s hours in makeup, hours in hair sometimes for the women–
John: For these women, not for you.
Craig: Correct.
John: You’re not spending hours to make that up.
Craig: No, and I have no hair.
John: Exactly. Makes life easy.
Craig: Yes, so they’re waking up early, and then there’s four hours of this stuff. Then they go to do the event, then they got to take it all off. It is a job. It’s nuts.
Drew: “Just needed to get ducks in a row on our side.”
John: “Here’s why you have not heard back from us. We know we need to respond to this thing, but we have not responded to this thing. We’re acknowledging that it’s taken a while.” Likely, in my experience, it’s just like there’s a higher-level person. There’s a boss who hadn’t read it. The lower people knew what their opinion was, but they couldn’t actually say that until the higher-level person did this. I just turned in a project last week, which I know I will not hear anything back from until after New Year’s, which is great and normal, but it’s all waiting on the big boss to read it.
Craig: I will typically hear people say, “Just give us a few weeks to get our ducks in a row.” “Our ducks in a row” means get the sign-offs from the people that need to sign off. I don’t know why “ducks in a row” is the euphemism we use, but it’s better than saying, “Just give me a few weeks. I’m not powerful enough to say yes.”
Drew: This next one’s a very assistant one. When you’re sending avails out, you say, “Let me know if any of these don’t work, and I’ll see what I can open up.”
John: I love that embedded in there, Drew used the word “avails,” which is, I think, a specific LA term as well, which is availability. It’s like when are there openings in a person’s schedule. Craig’s avails are very limited. Drew is always checking with Craig’s assistant for when he’s available to do things. I get busier at times, too, and so my availabilities are limited.
Specifically, the phrase that you’re putting out here, “Let me know if any of these avails don’t work. I’ll see what I can open up.” What are you really covering for when you say that?
Drew: It’s basically, “My boss has more free time than I’m telling you that they do, but I’m just giving you limited windows to make us seem busy.”
Craig: Yes, there are these three moments that work for next week or literally any other moment, yes.
John: Sometimes you open with misleading specificity, like, “How about 3:30 on Wednesday?” It turns out, really, the whole day is free.
Craig: This also may be code for, “My boss is busy. These are the times he is available, but your boss is more powerful than my boss, and he will move stuff for you.” It’s a nice way of indicating, “Okay.” I like this whole quiet assistant code. It’s interesting.
Drew: Along those lines, “Something came up that won’t be able to move.”
Craig: Oh, yes. No, that’s a a court case, probably.
[laughter]
John: Also, it’s vague enough. It’s like, “Oh, my God, is it the person having surgery?”
Craig: I went to the personal immediately. I’m like, “Okay, this is not work stuff.” That’s the end of that. Won’t be able to move. Okay, that’s not happening there. Oh, this next one.
Drew: “We’re waiting to hear what the team thought.”
Craig: I’ll tell you what the team thought. The team thought, “No.”
John: Drew has written down here, “Slow motion pass,” and that’s what it is. It’s just like, “We’re passing, but,” duh-duh-duh.
Craig: “We’re waiting to hear what the team thought.” Either you have no idea because you’re so low on the totem pole, and that means that they don’t care what you think, or you’re pretty high up on the totem pole and you just want to blame your team for passing. Either way, it’s not good.
Drew: “Let’s keep in touch in the context of a pass.”
Craig: Oh, no.
John: It’s no.
Craig: We can still be friends.
John: Yes, absolutely. We don’t hate you. It’s just that it’s not for us.
Drew: “It’s not quite right for us at the moment.”
Craig: I love the “quite.” “It’s not quite right for us at the moment.”
John: We all know what it means. Again, it’s a kind pass.
Craig: That means no.
John: Yes. Rarely are you going to hear a harsh pass where they hated it. They’re never going to say that. Your reps are never going to tell you that. Sometimes the real answer is like, “No, absolutely not.”
Craig: They didn’t like it. They didn’t like it. They didn’t like it. The end.
Drew: Or, “They didn’t spark to it.”
John: Yes.
Craig: Yes, they didn’t spark to it. Just the spark. Ding.
John: Here’s one that I added. “We’re looking for noisy projects.” Have you heard “noisy” is a good term?
Craig: I have heard noisy, yes.
John: Craig, tell me about what noisy means to you.
Craig: Noisy means something that gets people buzzing either in town or in the trades or people in social media like, “Zzzz.” KPop Demon Hunters was incredibly noisy. There are also things that get announced as development projects that are noisy. Then often what happens is years go by and the noise never turns into anything. They like stuff that gets people chattering.
John: Yes. The chatter doesn’t have to be entirely positive. It can get people upset, and that can also create some noise. Just anything that feels a little provocative or not safe and down the middle of the road is good. We’re recording this before Wuthering Heights has come out. My anticipation is it’s a noisy title. Whether people like it or hate it, it will get attention because of just the noise around it, which can be really nice.
Craig: Yes, yes, yes.
John: Drew, help us out.
Drew: “We’re not the right place for it.”
[laughter]
John: What I like about this is, “Basically, that’s actually a pretty good idea, but we just can’t do it.” I think it’s sometimes a nice thing to say, which is not really accurate. Sometimes it’s actually true. It’s just like, yes, that’s a movie that someone else could make, but it’s not for us.
Craig: Really, that’s like saying to somebody that asks you out, “I’m not the right person for you,” meaning, “I’m not right.” They don’t like it. There are so many ways of saying, “I don’t like it.”
John: Yes, but if you’re pitching an A24 movie to Imagine, that’s the–
Craig: Okay, but you won’t even get through the door, right?
John: This is real talk here. When I will go out with a project, like there was a Mattel project that I was attached to, and so we would make our list of, like, “Here are the places that seem like a good fit.” A lot of other places would want it because they wanted to be in businesses with me, which is lovely and flattering. If I end up pitching these places, it’s like, “You really aren’t going to do this movie.” It was just wasting people’s time. That’s why I wish we’re not the right place for it. It was more obvious at the start.
Craig: If somebody is like, “Look, I know you’re pitching something that is a Mattel thing. We don’t make things like that, but we want to hear the pitch anyway.” They really can’t then say after, “We like it. It’s just we’re not the right place for it.” No shit. We all said that, but it’s more like when they are the right place for it. [chuckles]
John: I think a 2026 goal for me, which maybe based on other stuff that I’m working on, but it’s just to be a little bit more brutal about like, “No, I’m not even going to do that meeting on that Zoom because there’s no point to it.”
Craig: There’s no point.
John: There’s no point.
Craig: There’s no point. Then this next one.
Drew: “They liked it. They just didn’t connect with it.”
Craig: Yes, they didn’t like it at all. [laughs]
John: They didn’t like it, no.
Craig: “I like it. It’s just that I don’t like it.”
John: I also hear like, “I wanted to like it, but I didn’t.”
Craig: They always want to like it.
Drew: “It didn’t fully land for us.”
Craig: Right. If a plane doesn’t fully land, that means it crashes in a fireball. [laughs] It didn’t fully land.
Drew: “We’re looking for something camera-ready.”
Craig: Oh, please. No, you’re not. Nobody knows what that is. Get out of here.
John: You know what camera-ready is? It’s a script that’s already written. It’s not a pitch.
Craig: You’re looking for something camera-ready. It’s a script, a budget, a schedule, a cast, a crew. I mean, please. “We’re looking for something camera-ready.” Yes. Oh, God. Dumb.
Drew: “Well-told.”
Craig: Oh, well-told.
John: Well-told. Oh, my God. I’ve gotten a couple of well-tolds. I just want to just turn off the Zoom-
Craig: -and commit seppuku. Well-told is what they say after you pitch them something. They don’t want it, and they were bored. They say, “Well-told.” You did a good job putting all those sentences in the air with your mouth full. “We don’t like them, but well-told.”
John: To me, that is like you just saw your friend’s play and it was awful. It’s like, “You were up there on stage. Wow. It was great to see you up there on that stage. Well-told.”
Craig: Well-told. Oh, yes, like, “You did it. You did it. Yes, well-told.” Oh, this next one is– I don’t know. This next one is– yes, it’s bad.
John: It’s bad. It’s ambiguous. It’s not always bad, but let’s–
Craig: It’s mostly bad.
Drew: “Let’s revisit after the holidays.”
Craig: Yes. Which holiday? Christmas 2000-and-never? That’s just like if you want something, and here’s what happens. All this stuff gets put in context once you do something that people want. Suddenly, there’s nothing that could be faster. They were like, “Well, there are three people that want this. They want it now. They want it two minutes ago. They don’t want to wait until tomorrow. Here’s an offer. It’s on the table right now, and if you turn it down, it’s gone forever.” It’s never, “We really want this. Let’s just not do anything about it for a while.”
John: The situation where it’s not a pass, where it’s like if you’re talking with your reps about a project to take out or stuff like that, like, “Let’s revisit after the holidays,” yes, that makes sense. Going out after director, that’s a thing that’s an absolutely valid thing because you don’t want to approach people generally this week in December. It’s just like everyone’s busy with other stuff.
Craig: Yes, and just fair.
John: Yes.
Drew: “I’ll defer to the team.”
Craig: What does that mean? What does that mean?
John: What does it mean, Drew?
Drew: You have a disagreement about a thing, but you don’t care enough to fight about it. You’ll let other people make the decisions.
Craig: Oh, “I’ll defer to the team.”
John: Yes, but the fact that you’re actually saying it out loud means that you are stating that you have a disagreement with it. It’s sometimes a useful piece of information, but yes. I haven’t heard it yet. Now, my ears will be open for it.
Craig: Yes, for team deferral.
Drew: “I want to be respectful of everyone’s time.”
Craig: [laughs] That means–
John: I’ve said this on Zooms, too, where it’s like, “This is going on a little long. We need to be done here.”
Craig: Yes, “I want to be respectful of my time.”
John: Yes, and often you’re saying that because there’s people who are on the East Coast or in London, and it’s 2:00 in the morning. It’s like, “Let’s just be done.”
Craig: Or not, or everyone’s in Los Angeles, and this is boring, and it’s too much. The phone version, well, yes, because that feels like a Zoom thing. The phone version that blew my mind the first time I heard it was, “Well, I’m going to let you go.” Well, I’m going to let you go. “I know you have been dying to get up this phone call. I’m going to let you get off the phone. Really, you weren’t dying to get up this phone call. I am. I’m hitting eject.” It blew my mind. I was like, “Oh, thank you for this lovely gift.”
John: My friend Erin Gibson will make fun of me because I have this thing where we’ll go to lunch. At a certain point, “Okay. Well, this was great.” She’s like, “Wow, you just stopped the lunch.” It was like, I’m done. I’m just trying to acknowledge the fact that this lunch is over, and we don’t need to keep dragging it out for another 15 minutes to think about it. This was great, and I’m stopping it.
Craig: I think the problem, if I may, is the tense. “This was great,” as in I unilaterally decided it ended before I said that statement. You get no participation in it. [chuckles]
John: Craig, correct me. How would you end the lunch?
Craig: I would say “has been” instead of “was.” “This has been lovely.”
John: Realistically, I was doing it. The constant presence of–
Craig: Sometimes I like to go, “Okay, I’ve had the best time. What are you doing next? What are you doing next today? Tell me what you’re doing next,” and then you–
John: Thinking for the future.
Craig: Obviously, talking about what’s coming right after this lunch gets everybody generally motivated to GTFO. What you do is nothing compared to what our friend Derek does.
John: Tell me.
Craig: Let’s say Melissa and I are out to dinner with Derek and Christy. It’s never the wrong point. It’s a point where he would just go, “Okay, I’m done. We’re going. Let’s go. Christy, we’re going.”
[laughter]
Craig: We’ve been at their house where like a bunch of people, like 10 people, and then Derek will go, “Okay, it’s over.” [chuckles] Christy is always like, “Derek. Derek.” He goes, “What? They’ve been here forever. It’s over.”
[laughter]
Craig: It’s actually awesome because we all know that he just is going to pull the plug, and that’s that.
John: I respect that. A little candor, a little honesty there.
Drew: I prefer the clean break.
Craig: Yes, it’s the opposite of the Irish goodbye.
John: Yes, exactly.
Craig: Oh, I have the best Irish goodbye. You know my ghost strategy?
John: Tell me.
Craig: I love to ghost. That’s my favorite thing. I’m at a party. In my mind, I’m like, “It’s time. It’s time for the ghosting.” I’ll start moving towards the door. I’m hoping that, at some point, and usually do, somebody’s like, “Are you leaving?” Then I go, “No, I don’t. I’m not Irish goodbying. I’m heading to the restroom, but I’ll be right back,” then I go.
John: They’re worried about you. “Craig, he said he wasn’t leaving, so something’s wrong.”
Craig: I say I am not doing it, so then if they don’t see me, they’re like, “Well, no, he didn’t leave. He said specifically he wasn’t going to do that. He’s somewhere.”
Drew: Diabolical.
Craig: Yes, but I’m gone. You know where I am? In my bed.
[laughter]
John: No, Craig actually does. He says that, and then he goes to the bathroom. He locks the door on the bathroom and then closes it. It seems like he’s locked in the bathroom. Everyone’s like, “What’s happened?” Meanwhile, there’s a line forming.
Craig: Yes. No, I lock the door, climb out the window. There’s not enough bathroom windows to climb out of. That is the air duct of– yes, there’s not supportive vents, and there are not bathroom windows to climb out of. What a shame.
John: It’s tough. Let’s get back to our passes here.
Craig: All right.
Drew: “A project’s too small.”
Craig: That’s crazy, but sure. I get it on some point.
John: I get it, yes.
Craig: Then you probably wouldn’t be pitching to a place where the project would be too small.
Drew: The next few seem to be from spec pilots or something, so like, “Not enough of a hook.”
Craig: Okay. Just the idea’s not grabby. All right.
John: Not catchy.
Drew: “Needs more of an engine.”
John: It’s boring. The story doesn’t go anyplace. It’s just like you’re stuck in one gear.
Craig: You’re not going to be able to write 20 episodes of this. You’re going to write two and then run out of stuff.
John: Yes.
Drew: “Too slice of life.”
Craig: What the hell does that mean?
John: I think it’s not story-driven in the sense of like there’s not a compelling thing that’s moving you along. It’s a hangout.
Craig: This is fascinating to me. That implies that there have been a lot of people writing stuff that has been two slice of life-y. I’m curious why. Is it a generational thing, where a certain cohort enjoys a slice-of-life story?
John: I wonder.
Craig: I don’t recall this being a thing.
John: I’ve never seen that as a note.
Craig: Yes, exactly.
Drew: I have a feeling probably a lot of stuff that’s geared towards younger people tends to be 20-somethings hanging out. Maybe that’s a nice way to say nothing’s happening.
Craig: I think maybe they should look at a little movie called Go, where things happened. You could argue that After Hours is a slice-of-life movie, but it’s tense. Stuff happens. It’s not just like doopity-doop. There were, but I will say there were some slice of life-y. Reality Bites was slice of life-y back in the day. The attraction of the movie was, “Look, it seems legitimate for people your age, right?”
John: Fast Times at Ridgemont High, yes.
Craig: Fast Times was actually quite slice of life-y. That’s true. That’s true.
John: Listen, comedy is on television like Friends.
Craig: Well, sitcoms are slice of life.
John: Everybody Loves Raymond, slice of life.
Craig: Yes, because it’s just the situation happens that week. That’s all. It’s the same. There have been slice-of-life movies that are good. I guess maybe the problem is it’s a pretty narrow target to hit. You’re Cameron Crowe. Yes, I could see you hitting that.
John: Indies tend to go more towards the slice of life, where it’s just a little small.
Craig: Sometimes, that can drift into self-indulgent or boring. That’s a nice way of saying this was bad.
John: You have one thing here as studio speak.
Drew: Yes. Aline’s assistant gave me this one because they tend to go out with very female-centered projects, and they will get the note back that the studios are looking for more “male-entry points,” which means–
John: I love this as a term. Incredible.
Craig: I need to talk to my wife about the male-entry points. This is the worst–
John: I just talked about Heated Rivalry, which was full of male-entry points.
[laughter]
Craig: That’s right. By the way, ever since you talked about Heated Rivalry, it’s one of those things where you buy a car, and then you see that car.
John: Oh, yes.
Craig: It’s been everywhere.
John: Everywhere.
Craig: Suddenly, on all the conglomeration sites I go to with news, it’s like– and then there’s this specific thing of why women are obsessed. Straight women are obsessed with this show. I started reading about it, but you were the first to mention those male-entry points.
John: Thank you. I’m flattered. I snuck in there because it was about to blow up as a meme.
Craig: Well, listen, gay culture is always right there in front of everything. Male-entry points on that show, yes, apparently, very important, but they’re important for all men.
[laughter]
Craig: It’s not just gay men, straight men. We’re all looking for entry points. This is the most horrible phrase possible for what it actually is intended to mean, which is, Drew?
Drew: That we want more male characters so that men will watch.
Craig: Just say that male-entry points, you’re taking something that’s already a little bit, “Eh,” and making it so much more, “Ugh.” Just say, “Yes.”
John: More dudes.
Craig: “We want our stuff to appeal to both genders equally. This feels a little lopsided.” That’s fine. That’s a perfectly fine thing to say because audiences have demographics. Male-entry points? Oh, yes.
John: It also feels like Netflix thinking about, “What are we going to put on the tile on Netflix as you’re scrolling through it?” As a gay man, my tiles on Netflix look entirely different than your tiles just because if there’s one hot guy in the show, if it’s the 19th character, that’s who will show up on my tile.
Craig: [laughs] I have to look and see. Do you want to see what shows up on mine? Because I don’t watch Netflix that often, so I’m going to it right now.
John: We can share screens and see. I rarely see Netflix on my computer, so let’s see if it actually holds up right.
Craig: Okay. Let’s see. All right. This is fascinating. Actually, I have cool tiles. I’ll share the screen here.
John: Excited?
Craig: Yes, so this is actually like a–
John: That feels pretty normal, yes.
Craig: It’s very normcore.
John: Listen, Schitt’s Creek has Annie as the lead character rather than–
Craig: Oh, so they do stuff like that even though–
John: Oh, yes.
Craig: Oh, interesting. Interesting. Okay.
John: Any situation where you’re not seeing maybe the main star but a supporting person is interesting.
Craig: Right, because they’re like, “You’ll like this pretty lady.” Oh, that’s interesting. This is not a bad collection. Well, they’ve got Man vs. Baby with Rowan Atkinson. I guess I would probably like that. [chuckles] They probably would like these things. Maybe I should watch more of these things. All right, so that was mine. Let’s take a look at yours.
John: All right. Let me share my screen here.
Craig: Your collection of hot guys. Oh, this is not that different from–
John: It’s not that different. We have the same tile for The Diplomat.
Craig: For Man on the Inside and Nobody Wants This and Wednesday. You have the baking show. Oh, but your Frankenstein tile is different. Your Frankenstein tile, I think there’s some hot guys in the extras here. [chuckles] Mine just had the monster. [chuckles] You have Rowan Atkinson also, but you have KPop Demon Hunters. I got to say, it’s not–
John: It’s not radically different.
Craig: It’s very, very similar. It’s very similar.
John: Nothing that’s showing up here, but there have definitely been times where it’s like, “Well, that’s absurd that they’re showing me that as the tile for this movie that person is barely in.” Now, there’s nothing that I’ve been scrolling through here that says like, “Oh, well, this is clearly just hot men.” What have we learned in our analysis of our discussion of stock phrases in Hollywood? Why do we have them? What good do they serve?
Craig: Well, they are illuminating about our business because I think in other businesses, people are far more curt and direct because we have a lot of personalities and because it is a little bit of a, “I don’t want to date you now, but if you get hot next year, I might want to date you then.” Everybody is shining everybody on. Nobody wants to say, “No, no, no.” They just want to be careful.
John: Yes, we’re a freelance business. You’re constantly looking for your next job, looking for the next thing. You’re constantly dating, and so you don’t want to preclude any opportunities. You’re trying to maintain relationships while also getting stuff done.
Craig: There’s a guy who is a partner at a prominent production company that will not be named. There was something that I had pitched them many years ago. Oh, no, sorry, I hadn’t pitched them. It was a script I’d written that I didn’t even know they got. This guy loved it, but wasn’t the right for us, but loved it. Years later, there was something I was doing that he wanted. He was like, “Remember, I loved that script.” I was like, “The one that you didn’t give me any money for?” That’s the thing. It’s like everyone’s always hedging their bets.
Nobody wants to be mean to anybody. That person could be your boss tomorrow. That’s how Hollywood works. Everyone’s careful, which can be frustrating at times because sometimes you just want the truth.
John: It’s not the extreme cliche of a Japanese culture, which they will never tell you no. It’s not that at all. You do have to learn what the things really mean. There’s an idiomatic quality to it. If you are coming into this from a foreign language or you’re neurodivergent, you may have a bit of a learning curve figuring out what’s actually really happening here. You may need to ask some people like, “Wait, what does that really mean?” Because you could make wrong assumptions.
Craig: Yes, absolutely. That’s a great point about neurodivergence because Hollywood has a lot of not neurodivergent people. Particularly in the area of producers and executives, those people often have outstanding social skills. They are really sharp and instinctive. They are slippery.
John: Yes. They’re also sometimes really good at managing up. You see, how does that person have their job? Because they seem actually terrible at everything I see them do. They’re really good at managing their bosses and understanding what their bosses want to hear and they can deliver that.
Craig: There is, I’ve always said, one of the great unheralded skills in Hollywood is the skill of not being fired. There are people that I think, literally, their only skill is they know how to not get fired. They’re still there. It is a thing. If you aren’t somebody that’s particularly well-attuned to subtleties and all those things, then, yes, you can be very quickly confused by or outclassed by these people in these meetings.
I’m thinking of one screenwriter we both know in particular who’s incredible, amazing, a legend, and so on the spectrum. I have seen him in meetings. I’m cringing. I’m like, “Oh, my God.” I just want to go over there and help because he does not have meeting skills at all.
John: That’s the case where you’re going to need to find reps and other trusted people who can actually help you interpret and really understand what’s going on, versus me at my point in my career, when I get on a phone call with my reps or even just emails with my reps, I can be very honest about, like, “That felt like a pass. That’s this.” I’m ahead of even where they’re at because I just know how things fit together. I know that this project feels great right now, and it’s going to get really bumpy in about a month when this thing happens. I know we’re not hearing back from this because of these other things, and that just comes with time and experience.
Craig: You will get better at it over time, no question.
John: All right, let’s talk about some numbers. I was listening to a podcast called Search Engine, which, Craig, you don’t listen to podcasts, but Search Engine is a really fun podcast that explores different topics. A fun thing they do for their premium subscribers is they do an annual meeting, kind of like how you have a shareholder’s annual meeting. They talk through this stuff. They have a Zoom, and they have a Q&A, but they make a presentation about how the year went, how things are going. Maybe in a future year, we’ll do that.
I thought on the episode today, we might talk through some of the numbers behind Scriptnotes, both the podcast and the book because I’m a big believer in transparency, letting people see how stuff actually works. Craig, we just passed 15 million downloads all time for Scriptnotes, which is absurd.
Craig: Wow, that’s crazy.
John: That’s crazy. 15 years?
Craig: It took us a long time, [chuckles] but still, that’s insane. 15 million downloads, wow.
John: 1.6 million downloads in 2025. We average 25,000 to 30,000 listeners per episode. Of those, between 2,000 and 3,000 are premium members who are paying money.
Craig: That’s information that I didn’t know. I don’t think that’s a lot compared to these big podcasts and everything. It’s just a lot in an absolute sense.
John: I remember many, many years ago, we were trying to understand our numbers. It was like, we’re Bon Jovi of podcasts. We’re filling a stadium. That’s kind of true, but it’s also–
Craig: It’s a small arena.
John: It’s a small arena.
Craig: Yes, it’s an arena, but you know what? Madison Square Garden, right? I think you got 30,000 people, you can fill MSG. It’s pretty good. It’s important to remember that there are a lot of people listening to it. That’s good. It reminds me to say fewer stupid things.
John: Our most-listened episode of the year was 673, Structure and How to Enjoy a Movie, which was just a crap episode, which is great.
Craig: I like that stuff.
John: Our all-time highest episode is the one with Christopher Nolan.
Craig: Of course.
John: Which was only about double the typical numbers of– It wasn’t like a giant spike outside of everything else. We have 4,500 premium subscribers. Those are the people who are paying us.
Craig: That’s great. Thank you to all of those people. That’s awesome.
John: Which is great. January is always our biggest month for premium subscribers, so thank you again for people who do it.
Craig: Oh, because it’s a Christmas gift?
John: It’s a Christmas gift to themselves or other people who bought it for them, which is awesome. Craig, you’ll remember that I think, last year, we were harping on people like, “Don’t do monthly. Do annually because it saves you so much money.” We bumped up the monthly to nudge people to do the annuals, and they did, which is great.
Craig: Great.
John: Everyone knows we zero out the budget every year. We’re not a nonprofit technically, but we’re just a corporation that deliberately does not want to make any money. We’re an LLC.
Craig: We’re a for-profit company that hates profit.
John: That’s what it is. At some point, we could probably do a B-corporation where we’re not–
Craig: We could convert to a 501(c)(3) kind of thing, right?
John: Yes. We talked about that with the lawyer people, and it’s like the amount of paperwork involved to do that is just–
Craig: We don’t receive a lot of tax-deductible stuff. It’s more that we just give it away when we hit the end of the year.
John: Before we started recording, we talked about how we’re giving away money that’s left over at the end of the year. We’re going to be supporting Pay Up Hollywood and their annual survey, and also Entertainment Community Fund, which we’ve often supported over the years. They help out with basically everyone in the entertainment industry, not just Hollywood, but also Broadway and other artists, musicians who need help. This last year, of course, we had the fires, and they were involved in helping people recover from the fires.
Craig: That’s great.
John: Everyone throughout. I’ve actually toured their buildings here in Hollywood. They have low-income housing for artists, and it’s a great organization.
Craig: Yes, this makes me feel good. I do want people to know because when we say 4,500 premium subscribers, they are paying us. Of course, just so people understand, we use that money to pay for our staff and to make the show. When there is money left over, and there is, we donate it to good causes.
John: Yes, which is nice. We also had a book this year. Our book, we hit the USA Today best-sellers chart, which is certainly not a given.
Craig: Okay, but I do love how we hit it, though. It’s perfect. It is not the top 10.
John: No. USA Today lists the top 150 titles each week.
Craig: 150. We came in at?
John: 149.
Craig: Boom.
John: 149, baby.
Craig: Suck it, 150.
John: The USA Today list is basically all books. Kids books, and because it was December, a ton of Christmas books are on that thing. We came in above the most recent Harry Potter Christmas book. Excited about that. We came in below the D&D Player’s Handbook, which felt so wonderful and so appropriate and correct.
Craig: Never want to overdo that.
John: One of the other big titles of the week that we came out was Olivia Nuzzi, the journalist, had a book about American Canto, which was the RFK Jr. stuff. We beat her.
Craig: Oh, really?
John: Yes. She sold 1,200 copies, and we sold 3,129 copies our opening week. We crushed that book. It was a good reminder that just because something is in the news, it doesn’t mean it’s actually selling any books.
Craig: Listen, this book business is tough. I always felt this about the book that we’ve done here is the kind of thing that just will hopefully be an evergreen and it just, over time, people– Not because we want to make money, because we don’t. It’s because I think it’s helpful. I think the book will help people. I do.
John: I think it will. Of the 3,129, the vast majority are the hardcovers, 2,400 of those, 300 e-books, 350 audio books. These are just the North American numbers. It’ll be a long time before we hear the UK numbers and the other places that we’ve sold. It’s a great start. You were on the email chain with the publishers. They’re happy with the start of this. It’s not like the runaway greatest hit bestseller of all time.
Craig: It was not going to be. [chuckles]
John: It’s a super strong launch for this book. We’re on a track to earn back our advance at some point. Around 13,000 copies sold. We’ll have earned back the money that they already paid us. Drew, we have some books that they’ve sent us that are currently under your desk. I want to make a pitch for what to do with those books because, obviously, we want people to buy books for themselves, which is great. There’s also probably a lot of school libraries, community libraries that also need books who don’t have the money to buy these books.
If you are a person who runs a local library, a school library, probably junior high school, or I don’t think a grade school library is going to be appropriate for our book, write to Drew, ask@johnaugust.com. Let us know what your library is. Provide some proof that you actually are this person who is responsible for obtaining books to these libraries. We’ll see if we can send you one of these books that we have here in the office because–
Craig: I honestly feel like if somebody takes the time to pretend to be a library, I think they’ve earned a book.
[laughter]
Craig: That’s kind of cool, yes.
John: We can send them to US libraries. Because of tariffs and customs and everything else, it’s going to be crazy if we try to send this overseas. For stuff here in the United States, we can send them to libraries because this is a book that I would have gotten out of my school library if I had been there.
Craig: Sure, of course. Cool.
John: Craig, any feelings about the numbers, any surprises, anything that you’re still sorting through?
Craig: I don’t know anything about the book business, so I don’t know what any of this means. I do think eventually we’ll earn our advance back. [chuckles]
John: Yes, we will.
Craig: Which is just, you know, otherwise I’ll feel bad.
John: Which is really rare, honestly, for a book to earn its advance back.
Craig: Then why did they make– Then, I don’t understand.
John: Here’s the math behind things, and I think this is the general stuff. I’m pretty sure our contract is similar. There’s the list price of the book, so that it’s $32 for the Scriptnotes’s book. Of that list price, we get $3.20. We get 10% of the first 5,000 copies. The next 5,000 copies we get at 12%. After that, we get at 15%. It’s that $3.20 that we’re earning on that story now that has been paid off our advance.
Craig: That’s the recoupable part. They’re going to make money is the point.
John: The publisher is still making money.
Craig: They’re making money.
John: They’re making money.
Craig: Got it.
John: The bookstores are making money, too.
Craig: Yes, good. Then I’m happy. I just want everybody to be happy.
John: An interesting thing about our book, it was something like 50% of our sales were Amazon, but a lot of them were not Amazon, which I think is also great too. Just the people buying through other places, including local bookstores. We’re excited about that.
Craig: Great.
John: If you still want a signed copy, there’s a place you can order called Premier. Drew, help me out here.
Drew: Yes, Premier Collectibles. I can put the link in the show notes.
John: Premier Collectibles has ones that Craig and I signed. If you’re in Los Angeles, you can also just go to Larchmont. Chevalier’s Books has a few left that we’ve signed on the day of our live show. They’re there if you want signed copies from me and Craig. Let’s answer some questions. Let’s start with this first one about video podcasts.
Drew: Keeping an Ear Out writes, “My question’s about the explosion of video podcasts. I heard that this terminology took off because studios wanted to make videos without signing contracts with IATSE. Is that true? More largely, what’s going on with the guilds in podcasting? Do any guilds cover digital content, and for what kind of labor?”
John: A couple of things. First off, there’s now a term called “audio podcast,” which we always thought of like podcast, of course, it’s audio, and then a video podcast is a separate thing, but now you actually have to distinguish it. Currently, Scriptnotes is an audio podcast. We may do some video stuff down the road. You look at some of these podcasts with video podcasts, and they’re not that different than a lot of talk shows would be or a lot of other broadcast shows. Now, Netflix is buying some of The Ringer’s shows and moving them over to Netflix.
Video podcasts are in this interesting space where it’s like just TV, and so why shouldn’t it have the same kind of rules as TV? I can tell you that some of this stuff is already being covered by the guilds. The Pod Save America podcasts are covered by the Writers Guild East. Whenever there’s a new market, you’ve got to figure out how are we going to handle it or treat it because you don’t want to come in with a heavy hammer and smash everything down before there’s even a viable economic model.
You also don’t want it to mutate into this thing that replaces what you’re actually really doing, or that existing programs get reclassified as being video podcasts. Rather than talk shows or things where we already have Appendix A protections for. We’re going to see what comes in this space.
Craig: Yes, I’m not sure what’s going on with IATSE here. I don’t quite understand how they go about organizing and doing things. The WGA, for instance, in this case, they have an organizing department. The point of the organizing department is to go to podcasts that are prominent. I think somebody said once, the Writers Guild looks to represent anyone who writes things that move on a screen. This moves on a screen. Let’s organize these shows. We can create contracts. The Writers Guild is not about coming in and saying, “Yes, you have a podcast, and you employ a writer. You have to sign the same terms that we sign with Apple and Paramount.”
John: Jimmy Fallon Show.
Craig: Yes. We have the ability to create separate agreements. We do. We also have an agreement with news writers. We have an agreement with daytime writers and all that. I think, yes, this is something that the Writers Guild could certainly do. IATSE can absolutely shut stuff down if they want. I don’t know if you can get around IATSE. At some point, they’ll come for you. When they come, they do have a hammer, a big hammer. Nobody wants to mess with that.
John: Really, you look at a show like Last Week Tonight, John Oliver’s show, which is terrific and great. It has a big writing staff and big production staff. They are able to create an amazing show every week. You compare it to some of the video podcasts, which are also creating a show every week. They may not be quite to the same scale, but they do similar things. This question of, shouldn’t they be treated the same, is correct. Also, the business model behind it is different. That’s why you need to make a separate way of thinking about the deal.
Craig: Yes. We look at the delivery system compared to the work itself. Is this being delivered through television? Is it being delivered through theatrical? Is it being delivered through the internet? Is it being delivered through– Everything can get its own thing. The Guild is not ignorant of the differences. I think, in a case like this, this is a good area for the– I don’t know what the Guild’s organizing department has been doing lately, but this would be an interesting spot to go.
John: This is the thing that the Guild’s organizing department is going to be focusing on. The East already started. We also talked about verticals a few minutes ago. That’s another thing, which is the Guild’s are now looking at how we’re treating those. WGA is, SAG is, thinking about how are we handling this thing? Because, clearly, we can’t just apply normal TV terms to it because there’s not enough money there for that to actually make sense, but you want to have some protections. You want to have ways that this area can grow, but also that people can make a living at it. Let’s answer one more question from Nicole.
Drew: “I have a couple projects that my reps are reluctant to send out anywhere because I created each of them with another person. Their argument is that they’re trying to sell me as an individual, and if I want to partner with someone, then they need to be able to sell us as a true writing partnership with our own joint samples and shared career track, and I need to commit to that forever. This isn’t really something I’m interested in, and my partners on these projects aren’t either. I’m not doing this willy-nilly.
In one instance, my TV concept is about a person with a disability, so it felt important that I develop it with a friend with a disability who’s also a TV writer with credits. Are my reps right, and it’s not worth trying to sell projects as a one-off partnership? Am I never allowed to work with my friends? Is there something I can do to make these one-off partnerships more appealing to my reps or to execs, and what’s the best way to proceed here?”
Craig: I think your reps are right.
John: I think your reps are right.
Craig: Look, these things aren’t dead. If you don’t want to have your career work as a team, and you want a solo career or the ability to join up with anyone at any time, you need to create your own career first. If you sell something as yourself, it goes well, you can always go back to the people that have paid you and said, “By the way, I’ve written a script with this other person. Take a look at it,” and they will. Okay, but first, you got to get going as yourself, and I’m guessing, based on this question, that you’re not necessarily at that place yet.
John: Yes. Nicole already has reps, which is great. I’m reading this letter saying that they signed you as an individual, and now they’re trying– You have this thing you wrote with somebody else. Like, “I don’t know what to do with this because we’ve been trying to sell you as an individual, and now we take this thing out, it just becomes weird and difficult.” I get it. Remember, reps want to be able to sell you to people and then give a consistent story about, “This is what she writes, this is the kind of thing she’s referring for. This is the kind of show they’re trying to staff her on.”
It’s confusing if they’re now trying to sell a thing which is written with somebody else.
Craig: Because then you are going to want to sell something by yourself, and people will ask, “We don’t know if Nicole’s good by herself.” It could have been the other one.
John: It’s the same with writing samples. If they read this thing that you guys wrote together, they’re like, “But did she really write it?”
Craig: Exactly.
John: Craig and I both know writing teams who’ve split apart, and they need to start writing something separately that is just their work, so people can read it as just their work.
Craig: Absolutely.
John: All right, let’s do our one cool thing. My one cool thing is a Substack written by the artist Charli XCX.
Craig: [sings] I don’t care. I love it.
John: Exactly. Craig, I’m impressed you know Charli XCX.
Craig: Of course. How dare you?
John: I am so sorry.
Craig: I barely. What I just did is pretty much the sum total of my Charli XCX.
John: Charli XCX of Brat. She did the music for the upcoming Wuthering Heights.
Craig: Brat Summer.
John: Brat Summer. Smart artist. She has a Substack, which is just her writing about the things that are on her mind. I just feel like more famous people should do it because it’s a chance to have it unfiltered, like, “This is exactly what I think, I don’t have to go through a journalist to put it out there.” Yes, it could be a blog. A Substack is just a common format for this kind of newsletter. I dig her for doing it. I think it’s a smart approach for this because it’s just an unfiltered, “This is what I think about, that one we’ll link to, is the death of cool.”
It’s like her opinion on how much she values cool in a way that is felt a little, I don’t know, she’s ambivalent about it, but also willing to acknowledge that, like, “Yes, I really care about being cool.” I really like that she’s actually just taking the form and just writing in it.
Craig: It’s blogging, right? This is sort of–
John: Yes, you and I both started as bloggers.
Craig: It’s like a very early 2000s thing that people are doing now. This is a new thing. [laughs]
John: This is a new thing?
Craig: No, it is not. It is an old thing, but this is very bloggy. I’m looking at it. It’s like, the blog is back, basically.
John: The blog is back.
Craig: Which is good. It means–
John: It’s not a visual medium. It’s not–
Craig: It’s words.
John: It’s just words.
Craig: Thank God.
John: Give her credit. She gets to string together words that communicate what she wants to say, which is nice. I don’t know. It gets more of us reading things versus just scrolling Instagram. I’ll take it.
Craig: Yes. Complete thoughts with nuanced arguments.
John: Yes.
Craig: Twitter just killed blogs. It just killed it. Now it’s back because Twitter died.
John: I’m glad for that.
Craig: Yes, yes. Dead bird.
John: Dead bird.
Craig: All right, well, that’s a good one. That’s a good one.
John: What are you looking for, Craig?
Craig: Oh, baby.
John: I see the trailer here, and I’m excited. I didn’t know about it, so [crosstalk]
Craig: At the Game Awards, which were held just a few days ago, the Game Awards are an interesting award ceremony because it’s like, I would say, 50% awards, 50% trailers and announcements. It’s like if the Oscars weren’t run by the Academy but rather just by all the studios. [laughter] The thing is, that’s why it’s an awesome award show, because really, it’s like the Super Bowl, where it’s like, “Okay, the game’s great, but show me the ads.” There was a trailer for the new game coming from Larian Studios. Larian Studios, which made our beloved Baldur’s Gate 3.
They had a prior franchise to Baldur’s Gate 3 called Divinity, and in fact, Baldur’s Gate 3 is built on the Divinity platform. They’ve announced essentially what looks to be a reboot-ish start, but not like going back to the start of a new story, but like with a different level of polish and accomplishment because of technology. The trailer is insane. Now it is not a game play trailer. It is very clearly like a very highly rendered cinematic sequence.
John: [crosstalk]
Craig: I’m going to tell you.
John: It’s giving Wicker Man, it’s giving–
Craig: It goes so crazy. [chuckles] I loved it. I loved it, and it was disturbing and beautiful and ugly and gross and amazing. I cannot wait to play Divinity, and I suspect I’m going to have to wait for some time. This was the first time that they announced that this is what they were doing. They’re saying it’s going to be bigger than Baldur’s Gate 3 in terms of the amount of content, which is mind-boggling to me.
John: Absurd. Will we ever get Grand Theft Auto, or will they keep kicking the can?
Craig: Oh, of course.
John: They’ll keep kicking the can.
Craig: No. I think they’re married to September 26th. They’re saying November 19th, 2026. I think they have to hit that. They have to. They can’t miss Christmas. They’re going to–
John: It’s true, it’s Christmas.
Craig: They have to.
John: This is very helpful.
Craig: In my mind, they are saying November 19th because they probably feel like they could absolutely be done by July. I mean, like, at this point. Either way, by the way, they could release it on the worst release date of the year, and it doesn’t matter.
John: Oh, yes. It doesn’t matter.
Craig: It will make $14 trillion.
John: It will break the internet.
Craig: It is going to break everything, including me. We should be well-wrapped in terms of shooting by then.
John: You’re going to just submarine into some GTA?
Craig: No. I have to do quite a bit of post-production, but still, honestly, yes.
John: AI can do it by then.
Craig: Oh God, how dare you? I can hear my editors screaming at you right now.
John: Oh my gosh. That’s the worst. That does look like an incredible trailer, so I’m excited to–
Craig: To tuck in and enjoy it fully.
John: Such smart people. We wanted to have the Larian folks on the show at some point to talk through the-
Craig: I would love to.
John: -storytelling of that. We’ll see if we can find time to get them on.
Craig: I would love that.
John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You will find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find the clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow.
You’ll also find us on Instagram at Scriptnotes Podcast. People have been sending through their book purchases on Instagram, so Drew reposts those when we see them on the stories. It’s great to see the book showing up in all different places. Craig, I don’t know if I’ve talked about how the book in the UK is a little bit narrower and embossed and shiny.
Craig: Yes.
John: It looks nice.
Craig: People in England deserve something nice.
John: They do. They need to have their own special kind of thing.
Craig: As well as Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland. I think I covered them all.
John: All the Commonwealth countries basically get the UK version. Oh, so Canada gets our version. We have t-shirts, and hoodies, and drinkware. You’ll find there’s a Cotton Bureau. You’ll find show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the e-mail you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you again to our 4,000 or so premium subscribers. You are superstars. Make it possible for us to do this each and every week. Get signed up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Difficult Collaborators. Craig, Drew, thank you so much for a fun show.
Craig: Thank you, John.
[Bonus Segment]
John: All right, we have a question from a writer abroad.
Drew: “How do you tell when a difficult collaboration is simply part of learning this industry and when it’s crossed over into something harmful to your creative spirit? How do you move forward without letting an experience like this make you smaller?”
Craig: Oh, dear.
John: Oh, dear. We’ve talked about this on many episodes, particularly about the mentor relationship or people who are like just bad behavior, or producers who are not even predatory, but just they’re crossing lines consistently. We’ll say this is a little different than the mentorship because this is a collaboration. This is somebody you’re supposed to be working with on a regular basis. I’ve had difficult collaborations where filmmakers, directors, who just like, “We just work at very different speeds.” Some of them have ended up being fruitful, and we got through it.
Some of them ended up badly. It’s a tough thing. I know, Craig, you started off with a writing partner. You and I both now write alone. I feel like I’m not a great creative roommate as a writer. The times I’ve tried to write with other people, I’m just a little controlling and demanding. Sometimes I’m the difficult collaborator, but in general, like, what are some things you’ve learned over the last 30 years doing this about collaboration and that instinct of like, “Oh, this is not working well?”
Craig: Collaboration with a director or a collaboration with a producer or a collaborator is different than collaboration with a writer. That is a very specific thing. I don’t know what the nature of this collaboration is that the writer’s asking about, but we can talk about, yes, I have had moments where I’ve written with other people that I enjoyed. I enjoyed writing with Todd Phillips. That was fun. Mostly, I just want to write by myself alone, to the extent that even though we do have a writer’s room for The Last of Us, I write the scripts. That’s just how I like to do it.
I know that, and I think if you know that about yourself, then it’s incumbent upon you to then avoid situations where you find yourself not being able to do that. When you are in a situation that you can’t avoid, the difficult collaboration comes in two flavors. One flavor is like what you were describing. I move at a different speed. Creatively, I think differently. We don’t agree on tone or all those things. That’s solvable by just one person saying, “I’m going to do it this way, the end.” Or you muddle through with this mush, and it just doesn’t work.
That’s a per-project thing. There’s really nothing you can do about that. That’s just, I’m tall, you’re short, that’s that. The ones that have really messed me up a little bit, and I feel like this is maybe what our questioner is wondering about, are the ones where it’s more of a personal problem. Where there is something that’s upsetting you as you work with somebody. You have a meeting, you work on something, you go home, and you don’t feel good. That’s a tougher one. The writer says, “Harmful to your creative spirit, how do you move forward without letting an experience like this make you smaller?”
There are times in this business where it will be harmful to your creative spirit. It will make you feel smaller. You will struggle with that. Maybe the value of those moments is just, “Okay, I just had the measles. I’m not going to get measles again. Not for a long, long time.” There is a difficult immunization that occurs through infection. It’s hard to recognize certain flavors of trouble until you’ve experienced the trouble.
John: Let’s talk about power. Because a lot of times, what’s really coming down here is who has the relative power in the relationship. In cases where you are a staff writer hired on in a writing room, and there’s a showrunner, and that showrunner has power. That showrunner is also making all the decisions. You can say, “It’s a difficult collaboration.” Yes, it is a form of collaboration, but you are really working for the showrunner. It’s understandable why you might feel frustrated. You might feel like this is difficult. You might not be having a good time in that space.
In terms of the creative process, ultimately, that showrunner is going to be making those decisions, and you have to give yourself some grace of, like, “I don’t have power or control in a lot of these things. That’s just what it is.” I was scrolling through Reddit screenwriting earlier this week, and this writer was complaining that there was a staff writer on a show, and they turned in their script. They didn’t give a lot of notes and feedback on it. The next time they saw the script, it had been really vastly rewritten, and they felt like, “Oh my God, this is so awful.” That’s the nature of the process that you’re in right now.
Craig: That’s normal.
John: That’s normal. Sometimes understanding what normal is, is part of that. Power could also be where you’re much more powerful than the other person you’re collaborating with, which has been some of my situation where I have tried to write with other people, where it’s just like, it wasn’t difficult from my side, but I’m sure it stuck with the other person because it’s like, I would just do whatever I was going to do. Where I suspect this person may be coming from, it’s like, they’re at a similar level here. It’s not clear who’s actually driving the car.
That’s one of the real frustrations, where it’s just like, you both are trying to pilot this thing, and you’re just disagreeing on how to do it, where you’re going. It’s sort of the couple’s therapy of it all, is figuring out how do we get this to work?
Craig: If the primary issue is this person has strong opinions about creatively why something should be this way, and you have opinions about why it should be the other way, in those circumstances, I try to default to the other person’s side, in the sense of like, “Okay, you feel strongly about this. Let’s dig into why, because you may convince me.” I want to be convinced. The whole point of a creative partnership is we are more than the sum of our parts. If I can understand where you’re going with this, maybe we’ll agree, and then we work in sync, or I learned something from you.
That’s potentially valuable. If they have the same attitude toward you, this could be quite fruitful. If they don’t, now you’re crossing into the other issue, which is the issue of personality. It can be incredibly difficult when the personality is such that it’s hard to describe in any other way than when you finish a session, you feel angry. You feel quietly resentful. You feel unheard. You feel insecure. You feel whatever it is that you feel. It may not be the other person’s fault. It may just be the symptom of a mismatch that you’re not meant to be collaborating with this person.
Sometimes, this is something that I still try and work on, is the toxic positivity thing of, like, sometimes in an effort to make something work. In the past, I have been in situations in the past, not recent past, but where I was to go along to get along, and the work suffered.
John: A mutual friend of ours had a very difficult collaboration on a project they were working on. I was hearing the backstory of what was going on behind the scenes, and I was full of sympathy. It’s like you’re both parents of this child, and you want the child to succeed. Sometimes, in those difficult marriages, you do have to suppress some of your instincts to just run away because you both want this child to succeed. It’s finding ways to acknowledge the actual frustration of this moment that you’re in and this contentious relationship.
Also, for the good of the kid, not letting it erupt and damage everything else until you can get through it. Then you can go your separate ways and be honest about what you loved about the experience and what was actually not great about the experience.
Craig: There have been times where it does feel like, okay, after every session, there’s some sort of personal discussion that needs to happen. That is sometimes unavoidable because of the nature of who we are. We are creative people. We’re weird. Our minds are doing this weird thing. It’s unlikely that your weirdness and another person’s weirdness will mesh so beautifully that, A, the work is better when you’re together, and B, you aren’t having personal issues of any kind with the person. Now, writing partnerships that work like that lasts. Thinking of like Harry Elfont and Deb Kaplan, or these people.
John: Dan and Dave.
Craig: Dan and Dave.
John: Benioff and Weiss. They will argue to death about a lot of things, but they’re still all writing together.
Craig: Right. It’s not possible that one of them walks away every single time, going, “I feel bad. I feel resentful. I feel angry. I feel unheard,” whatever it is. Their arguing is good arguing. It’s productive arguing. It’s not personal. Or even if it is personal, it’s personal in a way that’s like brothers, but we are secure enough in our love for each other that tomorrow we’ll be fine. I remember Johann Renck, and I had this thing of, like, because we loved each other, and we would fight all the time. It was such great fights. Very early on, we were like, “Let’s agree to agree.
If we fight, let’s fight. When we get to the end of the fight, we agree.” If you’re like, “Okay, you know what, I’m going with your way,” you don’t go with my way, and then walk away like, “I’m not doing that, actually,” or, “I’m angry.” You’re like, “Oh, okay. You know what? We’re doing it your way.” It worked. I think it worked because we loved each other and because we also had faith that the other person was persuadable. It’s when you feel like you’re in a deal where somebody’s not working in good faith with you that you lose confidence that, really, maybe this can function in a way that is fair and reasonable.
John: A perfect example from my own life was my very first TV show that I created and executive-produced. It was called D.C. It was for the WB Network. It was a partnership, a collaboration between me and Dick Wolf of Law & Order. Anyone should have been able to say, “Oh, this is not going to work. This is going to be disastrously bad.” It was. It wasn’t a good collaboration because of the power imbalance. He was so powerful, and I was the creative person trying to do all this stuff, but also didn’t know what I was doing that it was awful.
I ended up getting fired off the show and having a nervous breakdown. It was bad on almost all the fronts. The reason I bring it up, though, is in time as I pull back out, it just feels like a war that he and I were both in. I have no animosity to him. It was a bad idea for us to be collaborating on this project.
Craig: Mismatch.
John: We never actually made peace. We never spoke after I was fired.
Craig: You don’t need to.
John: We’re both fine. We’re both doing just fine.
Craig: It’s not like your paths are going to cross again. You’re not making procedurals for Dick Wolf. That is a mismatch. That can happen. I’ve been in mismatches. I’ve been in mismatches, and you muddle through. The thing about running a show is you cannot be in a mismatch. You will die. If there is a mismatch, it will express itself. You just won’t be able to make a show. Scott Frank often says, “Good process, good result, bad process, bad result.” It’s not always the case, but I do think if you don’t have some sort of healthy partnership, it’s hard to make something at all.
It’s hard enough even if you have a good one. I didn’t know you back then, but if I did and you were like, “Hey, I’m going to be making a show. I’m going to be running a show for the first time, and it’s for Dick Wolf.” I would have said, “Amazing,” but in my mind, I would have said, “Oh, no.” [laughter]
John: “Oh, no. That feels fraught.” Over the years, I’ve remet writers who are working on Law & Order in those same offices, and they’re like, “I used to just hide in my office because you and Dick would be shouting down the hall at each other.” Can you imagine me shouting in a hallway, Craig? That’s where I was at during that time.
Craig: No, sir. I can imagine you finding a janitor’s closet and crying in there. [laughs] That’s what I would do.
John: There was some of that, too.
Craig: That’s what I would do. I don’t shout down the hallway either. Our friend Derek, who made all the Chicago Fire and all those, he has some great Dick Wolf stories. They’re not bad stories, by the way. I don’t want to imply that he is, but he’s a big personality.
John: He had some power in that situation.
Craig: Derek actually is a great– I could say that is a match. The stories are fun. Dick Wolf is a fun character in his stories, but he’s certainly larger than life. There’s no question about that. Larger than life.
John: Wrapping all this up, you’re going to have situations where you have difficult collaborators. When you have choices about your collaborators, like Craig does in terms of hiring department heads, you’re focusing on the people who it’s going to be a fit. It’s going to be a marriage, and you can make that work. Other times, you’re going to be assigned. It’s like a roommate that’s assigned to you, and you’ve got to make it work and get through the semester. Then learn what you’ve learned.
Craig: Yes. One of the interesting things about being, what you said, in power, when you have power, then you are in a million collaborations, and you do have the ability to end them or continue them, promote them. That is also a tricky thing to recognize there’s something wrong and end it. It’s hard. We’ll call that a good problem to have, I suppose. For our person who’s writing in, I would say you are experiencing something that John and I have both experienced multiple times. The hope is that each time it happens, you at least learn, “Okay, that is a flavor I do not like. I don’t like that flavor of ice cream. Let’s not get pistachio. Oh, let’s not get French vanilla. I don’t like that one either.”
John: You recognize the patterns. You recognize off at first, being like, “The vibe is wrong, and I should trust my instinct there.”
Craig: Trust your instincts. It’s so hard because everyone else has no interest in your instincts. You just got to trust your instincts and trust them in defiance of whatever looks right on paper is nonsense. It doesn’t matter. I’ve talked a lot about when we chose a composer for Chernobyl, and Jóhann Jóhannsson died. We had to replace this incredible composer because he died. We went with Hildur Guðnadóttir, who had scored Sicario 2, and that’s it, but had been working with him and was like his protégé.
There were a lot of composers who– and on paper, she was the least qualified and the weirdest possible choice, but our instinct was that we loved her. Sometimes you just got to go by instinct and let go of what looks good on paper.
John: Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Drew.
Craig: Thanks, guys.
Drew: Thanks.
Links:
- How Disney’s OpenAI Deal Changes Everything by Steven Zeitchik and Julian Sancton for The Hollywood Reporter
- Guilty! Director Who Scammed Netflix Out Of Millions Faces Decades Behind Bars by Dominic Patten for Deadline
- Writing Movies for Fun and Profit: How We Made a Billion Dollars at the Box Office and You Can, Too! by Robert Ben Garant & Thomas Lennon
- Down to Puck: Why Women Are Going Wild for ‘Heated Rivalry’ by Seth Abramovitch for The Hollywood Reporter
- Search Engine annual meeting
- Order a signed copy of the Scriptnotes Book!
- Charli XCX’s Substack
- Trailer for Divinity by Larian Studios
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