The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hey, this is John. Standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids, there’s some swearing in this episode.
Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: No, I don’t think so. I think my name is Craig Mazin.
John: You’re listening to episode 723 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. As writers, we often use comparisons when pitching or discussing projects. It’s diehard on a bus. It’s driving mistakes. He meets the hangover. Today on the show, what makes a useful comp and when is it hurting more than it helps?
We’ll also answer listener questions and in our bonus segment for premium members, let’s discuss email. We can talk about inbox zero, but Craig, I suspect that one of our listeners might have the answer to this weird thing that happens with just your email, where sometimes people on our email chain get your emails or they don’t. I will get your emails or won’t get it. Someone out there is an email expert who will tell us what’s actually going on.
Craig: Okay. I’m excited for that. That would be nice. Hopefully somebody who works at Google. Why don’t I just call my friend who’s the vice president of engineering of Chrome? I should call him.
John: I think our listeners are going to have their answers.
Craig: Let’s let our listeners do it.
John: Yes, because often we provide answers to our listeners, but sometimes our listeners provide answers to us. This could be one of those situations.
Craig: It’s nice for them to be able to do a service.
John: Yes, nice. Now, this is not an official segment, but it’s the second or maybe a third time, so it’s almost become a segment, which is John Recently Learned, in which I share some fact that I’ve somehow been unaware of my entire life, and in confessing my ignorance, all may benefit, we can all gain from a thing I just learned this past week.
Craig: All right.
John: Craig, you know we’re redoing the studio downstairs where we record the podcast, getting ready for a transition to video. One of the things we wanted to do was put a lamp in this corner. I had a floor lamp that’s usually behind me on this Zoom, which looks really nice, but it never actually worked. Our DPs are like, “Oh, it’d be great if that lamp actually turned on,” which is a thing that a DP might say.
Craig: Yes, “Lights on.”
John: Lights on. Lights are not just there to look good. They actually are there to-
Craig: Light.
John: -serve a function. I was looking at this lamp. I was like, “You know what? Rewiring a lamp is a thing a person can do. It’s not an impossible skill.” I bought myself a little kit on Amazon. It was 10 bucks. It had the long cord and the new thing to screw in the light bulb, all that stuff. As I was undoing this kit, one of the instructions was, the second instruction was, “Make sure that the ribbed side of the power cord goes to the silver connector.” I’m like, the ribbed side of the power cord. Craig, do you know what that means?
Craig: Of course.
John: Tell me what that means.
Craig: Well, if there’s two wires going through a cord– I can’t remember if the ribbed side is the load or if it’s the ground or how that works.
John: It’s the neutral wire.
Craig: It’s the neutral wire. Okay. I didn’t know specifically which one it was, but I know that a power cord is going to have an indication if it’s a dual, which they almost always are. All the wires inside usually have different colors.
John: The wires inside aren’t actually different colors. What you described is a thing I never was aware of my entire life. It’s that every power cord you’ve ever touched, that’s every plastic power cord, one side is routed and smooth and the other side is grooved. I was unaware of this. Drew was not aware of this. This was a revelation. Yes.
Drew: I thought that was just how it was manufactured. It was wrapped in a certain way and there was a seam, but the seam is actually the ribbing.
Craig: Correct. It would not really come into play, unless you are sitting there wiring something. You see, even me, I didn’t– because most of the wiring that I’ve done is not even wiring, it’s been audio connecting or low voltage stuff, like putting thermostats in. That’s fun because there’s 12 different wires and they’re all different colors. One side’s got the little texture.
John: Yes. That texture is there because it allows an electrician who’s working in low light to be able to tell which wire is which wire, which makes so much sense. Of course, that goes all the way down to, if you have a polarized plug that has a wider side, the rib side goes to the wider side, which all makes sense. It’s reminding me of Chesterton’s fence, which is that concept that whenever there is a rule or design staying out there that seems pointless, there probably actually is a point. There’s a reason why things are the way they are and you shouldn’t just go through and blindly assume that there’s no good reason for that thing to be there because it was put there for a purpose.
Craig: John, we’re Americans. We know better.
John: This last week, I learned about that power cords have two sides. I also learned the underwriter’s knot, which I thought was fascinating. As you’re wiring a lamp, before you actually make those connections to where the bulb screw is in, you tie an underwriter’s knot, which is a really simple little knot, but it’s called the underwriter’s knot because of insurance underwriting. You’ve often seen the little UL symbol on electronics. That all goes back to the days-
Craig: That’s the approval.
John: Yes. It all goes back to the days of insurance, specifically fire insurance. As electrical appliances were added to homes, homes were burning down all the time.
Craig: LOL.
John: LOL. Standards were developed about electronic appliances, and one of them was the underwriter’s knot, which keeps it so that a power cord won’t pull out of an appliance and it won’t disconnect from what it’s supposed to be connected to. You tie this knot so that if the cord gets pulled, the knot gets tighter, but it doesn’t pull out of the electronic device.
Craig: If you keep going like this, I’m going to have you over at my place, do some simple rewiring.
John: [unintelligible 00:05:47] some powerful wiring.
Craig: I’m going to start you with some simple stuff, but it will be deadly. Then we’ll move up from there.
John: Let’s do some follow-up. First off, Craig, you and I wrote a book called the Scriptnotes book.
Craig: What?
John: A reminder to people who work at libraries, people who are friends of libraries, is that if libraries contact us in the US and say, like, “Hey, we’d like a copy of the Scriptnotes book,” we have some to send out. Drew’s been sending those out, but we still have some more to send out. If you would like to see your library with a copy of the Scriptnotes book, we want to make sure that they can get the copy, because libraries don’t have limited money, and we have some books. We can send them out.
Craig: That would be nice. You know who would love that? Leonard Mazin. Leonard Mazin, my dear departed father, loved going to the library. His whole thing was, God, he did not like spending money, but he sure liked reading. His thing was, he would fill out a request card. The library had request cards. “I would like this book that you don’t have.” They would go and buy the book and put it in the library. Their whole theory, I assume, was like, “We’ll just go through these in the order we received them.” Nobody ever filled out a request card, as far as I know, other than Leonard Mazin. The library near our house was just mostly books that my dad wanted. [laughs]
John: That’s so good.
Craig: That’s awesome.
John: My mom was also a giant library user. She was there twice a week, at least, and would go through all of the crime novels that [unintelligible 00:07:12]
Craig: Your mom and my dad, who knows? In another lifetime, you know?
John: Yes. Maybe in the afterlife, they were both in New Jersey at the right time.
Craig: [crosstalk] libraries.
John: It could have happened. Craig, we could have been brothers.
Craig: We kind of are.
John: We kind of are brothers.
Craig: We kind of are.
John: Continuing the follow-up on Scriptnotes book, we talked about how happy we were with the launch of the book. It sold a bunch of copies. I’m pasting in the little chart that shows how many we’ve sold week by week. It’s doing really well. We’re on a good track to eventually pay off the advance we received. It looks like we’re getting the top 10% of nonfiction releases for the year, which is great.
Craig: That’s fantastic. People keep sending me pictures of them holding the big orange thing.
John: We love it.
Craig: That’s lovely.
John: We made the right choice sticking with the orange cover. I can’t believe we ever got pushback on that.
Craig: Oh, did they try and give us some other cover?
John: Oh, yes. They wanted to give us a blue cover.
Craig: That’s just wrong, isn’t it?
John: It’s not Scriptnotes. It’s off-brand.
Craig: No, I think we did it right.
John: Yes. Drew, we have some follow-up about orality.
Drew: Reverend Kyle writes, “I’ve listened to the podcast for a few years now, even though I’m not a screenwriter or even in the entertainment industry. As a pastor, I write a sermon every week, along with community prayers and eulogies or comments to local government councils. After listening to the segment on orality, why I enjoyed the podcast clicked.
What I write is rarely read but spoken. I also listened to the podcast about comedy writing with similar insights. The translation from page to pulpit sometimes works, sometimes stumbles, but could never be performed by someone else. No matter the quality, there’s more to be written for next week. Thanks for helping me hone my craft and reminding me to appreciate the unique artistry of my non-screenwriting writing.”
Craig: I love that. Reverend Kyle, you are pointing out that speech writing, which, that is a job. That’s a big job, especially in politics, as we know, is also high orality. It’s all orality. I think about Peggy Noonan. Peggy Noonan, has she written a great novel or anything? No, but one hell of a speech writer.
John: Yes. Having had to work on a speech that I’ll be giving about 15 times for the next couple months, recognizing how one speaker specifically puts words together is so crucial. You write a thing that is designed for one person to give, and it’s a marker of their oral fingerprints.
Craig: Yes, that’s absolutely right. Sermons are high orality.
Drew: Yes. More follow-up on “a film by.” Tim writes, “Craig mentioned that he thinks a film buy credit is like a slap in the face to the entire cast and crew. Yes, that is unless the film stinks. Then everyone breathes a sigh of relief and says, “Thank you for taking credit for that mess, do not blame me.”
Craig: [laughs] The good news, Tim, is that if a film stinks, no one’s scrolling through those end credits hunting down, “All right, I didn’t need to know the head of every department.” [laughs] They still blame the director and the writer, possibly the actor, although rarely. I will say at least, yes, if it stinks, it’s less of a problem that it’s a film by, we have a film by Brett Ratner out this week, I believe.
John: Yes, that’s right.
Craig: Does it say film by on it? Does it say film by?
John: I don’t know. For everyone who saw it, I don’t think any of our listeners saw it, but for anyone who saw it, I’m curious whether it has a film by credit. Craig, I think we’ve talked about this before. I also don’t like a film by. I have much less problem with a first name, last name film, and so like a Spike Lee joint, a Quentin Tarantino film. To me, it’s like, well, this is clearly part of their canon, and so it’s like, oh, it’s part of their work. Just removing the word by helps me out and makes me much less annoyed by the credit.
Craig: Yes, I don’t like any credit that suggests possession. John Carpenter, great filmmaker, likes to say John Carpenter’s blah. I don’t think that’s really necessary. How much more do you need to talk about you as the thing? It just– I don’t know. Yes, but a Spike Lee joint– It’s marketing. Really, it’s marketing.
John: At a certain point, it’s marketing.
Craig: It’s all marketing, but I just– I don’t know. I would hate to walk around a film set looking at everybody working really hard and thinking, “These people are putting a great day in on Craig Mazin’s blah-diddy-blah.” That’s just weird. That’s weird.
John: That apostrophe implies the by, which is, I think, a Craig Mazin production, a Craig Mazin film.
Craig: It’s all bad to me.
John: You’re working on a Spielberg movie. [unintelligible 00:11:53]
Craig: Yes, but Spielberg doesn’t– He probably does say a film by Steven Spielberg.
John: Or I think he may say a Steven Spielberg film.
Craig: Yes, he doesn’t need to.
John: Yes, he doesn’t need to.
Craig: We all know.
John: All right, let’s talk about comps. This comes out of a question that Kristoff wrote in about. Drew, help us out with what Kristoff wrote.
Drew: “I’m wondering how you handle the name-dropping of movies in meetings. On the podcast, a lot of your go-to references seem to be from the ’80s and ’90s, presumably when you were seeing the most movies. Is that something you adjust when you’re talking to a clearly younger exec who may not be familiar with a random but great movie? I’m not talking about, it’s die hard in the Louvre. More along the lines of, it’s the dark tone from this film, or it’s the slow burn from that film. Obviously, you adapt to whoever your audience is, but I’d love to hear you talk about what your thinking is about this.”
John: Kristoff was subtly calling us old by saying that our references are from the ’80s and ’90s. I don’t think we’re actually– I don’t know. We can do some sort of meta-analysis to figure out what movies we’re referring to most often.
Craig: Oh, we’re old. Guilty as charged, this is we do the thing that old people did to us, and we’re doing it to you, and you’re going to do it to the kids when you’re older, Kristoff. Watch. Just watch.
John: To answer a little part of his question before we get to the bigger topic, I will sometimes adjust a reference I make if I think this executive wouldn’t have seen it because they’re too young for them, or [unintelligible 00:13:18] is really sort of, my generation, it’s not their generation, but it doesn’t come up that often, honestly. I don’t find myself having to do that, because if I’m referring back to an old movie, it’s so canonical, they’re going to know what that is. They’re going to know what Indiana Jones was.
Craig: My feeling about this has always been that if you need to say this, then you’re missing something about the way you are communicating the concept in the first place, because it inevitably will debase whatever the originality is of what you’re considering. We used to do it when originality wasn’t what we wanted. There was this stretch where a studio would say, “Hey, we need Ace Ventura. Where’s our Ace Ventura: Pet Detective?” Old reference. People would come in, and they were like, “It’s Ace Ventura meets,” blah, blah, blah, because that’s what they literally were asking for.
I understand that, but in these days, I can hear some writers going over and saying, “It’s Sinners.” I can hear them saying it, and I want to slap it. I want to slap it right out of their mouth, but to me, the comparison stuff is mostly useful when you know what they’re looking for is a comparison thing.
John: Let’s talk about comps in a general sense. When I say comps, I’m not talking about things you would actually include in a script, I’m talking about the conversation around a project. You’re going after pitching. You’re trying to describe what an existing movie is or a theoretical movie is going to feel like, or a series. That is X meets Y or something in the vein of X, but it’s really providing a fast, cognitive shortcut or anchor. Some people can say it’s creating a mental space for them for what the movie is. It’s lowering the cost of thinking about the movie because it’s giving us a handle for it. It’s positioning.
You’re trying to signal, generally, tone, audience, budget zone, the lane for marketing. It’s all basically a form of pattern recognition and pattern matching. It’s like, oh, it’s this kind of thing, which is just what humans are built to do. You’re doing it for yourself and in this meeting, but also you’re giving them something for when they need to pitch the project upwards or downwards or to somebody else. It’s like, “Let me tell you how to talk about this project to your boss.” You’re clarifying the tone, but also the prestige level. It’s the difference between a, here’s an old reference, a Merchant Ivory movie versus-
Craig: Oh my God, it’s getting older.
John: It’s getting older and older. Versus Bridgerton. Those can both be period dramas, but they have a different feel and a tone to them. That’s why sometimes it’s useful to have those things. Before we get into the pros and cons, anything I’m missing from that list of why we use comps?
Craig: I’ll add one more. I hate it now, and it’s less prominent now, but for a long time, it seemed to me that people who bought things were required to have some big brain theory about how stuff worked. Jeffrey Katzenberg was famous for his like, “The idea is king,” blah, blah, blah. All these people needed some kind of science that made them valuable as a gatekeeper.
It’s less important now, I suppose, because they’ve just handed it off to a stupid computer that is just as right and wrong as people were, but one thing that a comp could do was basically give them what they wanted to hear for their stupid theory.
John: Exactly.
Craig: Like, I don’t want to make the movie that your stupid theory is demanding, but I can describe it in a way that answers your concern, that it doesn’t match your nonsense.
John: There was a project that came over my desk or through my email this last week, a big piece of IP, and the company who owns the rights saying, “Well, we’re not sure what we want to do, but the Jumanji version might be this versus the Indiana Jones version might be this.” Also, you get it because they were discussing two very different story engines for what it would be, and that is useful.
It’s reductionist, and we’re going to talk about why that can be a problem, but I also get why they did it, because it makes it clear like, “Oh, again, I can feel the pattern that you’re trying to fit into here for what this is.” Jumanji and Indiana Jones both feel like, okay, we get that this is an expensive movie with certain kinds of things in it.
Craig: I don’t mind when they do it. That’s fine, because when I ask somebody to do something that I cannot do, I will say, “Hey, look, I’m going to give you some broad references, but don’t just do the references.” I’m just vaguely pointing you– I talk about this with the people that work on our show all the time. “Okay, what do you think?” “Well, I’m going to send you a picture or something, but not this. Please not this,” but just this weird indication of something, some shred of my intention, but then come back, and it does help them a little as long as you’re not prescriptive about it and you’re not saying like, “Oh, either it’s going to be Jumanji or it’s going to be Indiana Jones.” I don’t even know what this IP is, but those two things as an A or a B makes total sense.
John: Going back to you sending through an image to somebody, what I find so useful is if a director sends me an image or a producer sends me an image, I get some sense of, okay, why are they sending me this image? I can then ask them a question. It’s like, what is it about this that appeals to you? They don’t want me to give them this, but there’s something about it that’s speaking to them, and it starts a conversation.
Craig: Absolutely.
John: I think we’re saying that if a comp helps start a conversation rather than shutting down a conversation, it can be useful, if not-
Craig: Yes, I think the modern version of the comp is the mood board, and I would much rather look at a mood board, because the whole point is this is abstract. This is meant to tickle your inner weird brain and not be just derp de derp.
John: Let’s tick off some of the pros of a comp. Quickly, speed and clarity. It gets you up to a certain point very quickly. As I said, it communicates a genre, tone, scale, ambition, and taste. Like, “This is the kind of movie I want to make here.” It helps you align with what the market is going to be for it. Is this going to be an A24 movie? Does it feel like an A24 movie, or does it feel like a Blumhouse movie? A horror movie could go into either camp, but probably they’re different movies. It gets everybody on the same page.
We’re all trying to maybe make the same general kind of movie, or at least starts that conversation, and it can reduce misunderstandings about like, are we trying to make a broad comedy or a grounded drama? There have been some unsuccessful films and series where I wonder if they didn’t have the same comps going into it, where the writer had one vision, the director had a different vision, the studio had a different vision, and you can feel like you’re being pulled in too many different ways. A comp might have been an early– well, it could have been helpful or it could have been a problem that got them to where they ended up.
Craig: It’s interesting because sometimes, and I see we’re heading into the cons, the comp becomes the enemy, which is not bad in the sense that you do want to do something original. You don’t want to just do Jumanji on the moon, which actually sounds great, I want to write that now, but then everyone’s like, “Wait a second, but we don’t want to just do that.” Then people start pushing away from it, and it can become the thing that nobody wants to do.
John: Let’s talk about the cons, because I have two things here which very much speak to what this problem can be. First, it can get people locked into the wrong mental model, where it’s like, “Oh, well, we’re making Jumanji. In Jumanji, they did this.” It’s like, “Well, Jumanji was helpful for thinking about what kind of engine, but we aren’t literally making Jumanji.” Not just in the initial pitch of it, but then in the notes you get draft after draft, they could be pushing you towards Jumanji when it was never supposed to be Jumanji. It’s not its own thing. It’s just a different version of Jumanji, and that’s the real problem.
Craig: People don’t know how frequently this occurs, where people who are not good at their jobs, and that’s most people in Hollywood, and let’s call them people who will not eventually be working in Hollywood. You have an executive. That person is in charge of your project. I’m going to tell you right now, I’m going to let you look into the future. They’re gone.
In 10 years, they’re working in insurance. Right now, they are in charge of the development of your movie, and they are, out of fear and lack of imagination and concern that they’re not giving their bosses the Jumanji thing, are going to give you notes that are literally, “But in Jumanji, it works like this. You should make it work like this.” You sit at home as the writer tearing your hair out if you have any or doing whatever John and I do. [laughter]
You are trying your best to not just do that, and a lot of times what ends up happening is some weird monster movie. It’s not a movie about monsters, it’s a movie that is a monster because it was one thing, and then it’s dragging half of a dead Jumanji corpse behind it.
John: Obviously, if you’re working on a piece of established IP, like when I did the Aladdin adaptation, you’re going to be dealing with all the pressure to pull it back towards the animated Aladdin, which was a real frustration for me. At least there’s a reason why you can understand why they’re trying to refer back to the original Aladdin. If it was Jumanji or The Lego Movie or the other successful pieces of IP that you could have pitched as templates for it, that’s not even a thing that’s yours, and that’s the crisis.
Craig: It’s funny. The Lego Movie is a really interesting one, because there are movies that they will throw at you as comps that they want to do, and people will say The Lego Movie all the time.
John: All the time.
Craig: Lego Movie becomes a catch-all for you can make a good movie about anything. Well, my answer is always, no, I think Chris and Phil can make a good movie about everything, but also, they never want you to do the stuff in Lego Movie that we think of as awesome. They wouldn’t go anywhere near it. They’re not brave enough to. There is an unfettered, insane creativity to what Chris and Phil do that you can tell is so dismissive of whatever the orthodoxy is. When anyone says Lego Movie, I start giggling and really I’m like, “Oh, anarchy? Absolutely. Put me in charge and let me go.” That is literally the point of Lego Movie, is anarchy.
John: It’s also so fascinating because Lego Movie is so often what people are aiming for. I would say half of the toy-related titles that are out there in the world, Lego Movie is not just the comp, it’s sort of just that it’s the North Star, that it’s what they’re aiming for. Yet other very successful franchises, you don’t see so often. Minions is a great movie. Almost no one’s trying to make their own Minions because it’s just so specific and weird. I think people recognize you can’t do that otherwise.
Craig: It also is not good fodder for those discussions. Sometimes movies that work because of their beautiful simplicity are not going to be referred to because it’s not going to help you. They’re looking for things that they consider to be complexly good, that will help you navigate the story of this complex movie about the slinky. The fact is it rarely does help.
I think you’ve put your finger on where it helps. Very early on when there is just a huge question about, it was very helpful when, I remember we sat down and we pitched the sheep detective movie 10 years ago, 17 years ago. It was very useful to say, totally babe.
John: Babe, yes.
Craig: Everybody could be like, “Okay, got it. It’s not totally Minions. It’s not Toy Story. It’s babe. Got it.” Helped. Then we could just say, that’s not going to impact the story, the characters, anything. Now you know what planet we live on.
John: There’s a project that I don’t know if it’ll ever happen, but Paddington has been an incredibly useful reference because that’s a movie with all live action people and one animated bear and you buy it within the context of the world. It’s not unprecedented. It gives you a sense of like, oh, this is what it’s going to feel like. Even if the tone was different, the sense that movie worked and was successful and everyone gets it is really helpful.
Craig: It is nice because people will say, “I don’t understand, so you’re saying that the movie takes place in the world, but there’s a talking animal, but only one talking animal and he wears clothes and no one really seems to comment about it?” You can say, “Well, Paddington.” Then sometimes it’s like, “Well, yes, but other than that–” I love it when they get into, like guys, “We’re not arguing about science. Stop it. Does it sound like fun or not?”
John: Taking off a few more cons is that, even if your project really is groundbreakingly original, that comp could make it feel derivative. You could have just a great new idea, you could have the matrix, but because you referred to some other thing, and it’s like, “Well, but The Matrix.” It’s like– Yes, you have to be careful.
Craig: Man, look, if you can say with a straight face, “I don’t have a comp for this movie. This movie is going to be a comp for other people,” that’s bold, but that is what the world Wachowskis could have said because that is what they made. I don’t know how to begin a comp for The Matrix, but how many times has the words The Matrix been uttered as what my movie is? Imagine The Matrix If.
John: Here’s the problem with imagine The Matrix If, is like, The Matrix tone is so specific and the scale is so specific that if you say The Matrix But, it’s like, “Wait, what things are you taking from The Matrix and what are you leaving behind?”
Craig: Right. Sorry. If you take one thing out of The Matrix, it’s not The Matrix anymore, but that’s the beauty of an original story. I don’t know how– they had a book, but a comp for Silence of the Lambs, I don’t know if anything had ever been done quite like that. Let’s see if we can keep going back in time so that they can keep making it happen.
John: Yes, older and older [inaudible 00:28:06] until we get to Casablanca. We’ll stop at Casablanca.
Craig: The Great Train Robbery, What was the comp for that? [laughs]
John: Absolutely. Some play. A useful comp. I think it gives you some sense of the scale and genre. If I’ve been pitching and I say, it’s a contained thriller in the spirit of Panic Room, but with a supernatural twist, great. That is useful because it gives me a sense like, okay, Panic Room, I get that it’s a movie of a certain size and scale, but that is still very constrained, and the supernatural twist, I get that. It was useful for them to say Panic Room.
A useful comp is expansive, but not reductive. As we said before, it’s starting a conversation, but it’s not constraining you down to a smaller thing. You’re saying it’s not crazy to make this kind of movie, but we’re also just not rehashing something that’s old. I think a fresher comp is generally more useful for the market. If you’re making a domestic thriller and you’re pitching one this week, you’re going to reference The Housemaid because it made $300 million worldwide. It’s a big, giant hit. That is useful.
Craig: It’s funny, it’s also the least useful productively because it was just out.
John: They just made it. Yes.
Craig: Creatively, it’s better to go, I’m going to unearth some weird crap that you’ve forgotten about, but yes, this works definitely better in the room.
John: There’s 15 other movies you could think of that are probably domestic thrillers that might be closer to your specific thing. Getting back to Kristoff’s original question, it’s like, if they’re not going to know that reference, then it’s not useful to bring up that reference.
Craig: That’s right. God, I’ve seen that happen a few times, where someone basically says the equivalent of, “I’m old and confused.” Don’t do that.
John: Don’t do that. Then there’s a question of like, what are the timeless comps that are so canonical that you can always use them? I listed a few here. We said The Lego Movie already. I think Clueless is a timeless comp, Legally Blonde, in the sense of she’s a feisty outsider who bests the system, The Devil Wears Prada, A Few Good Men, The Social Network. Those are things I think you can reasonably assume that most executives you’re talking with are going to have a familiarity with, and so you could use them. There’s more, but those are some good obvious choices. Weirdly, Star Wars is not a comp you’re going to use in things because it’s too iconic and too specific to what it is.
Craig: It’s also just everything now.
John: It’s everything.
Craig: It’s everything. Yes, and I think it’s probably good. I would like to hear from some of our listeners in their 20s and early 30s about the comps that they frequently use in here because I suspect they’re going to be more recent than these. Although I do note that Aaron Sorkin gets two on your list, which is impressive. We haven’t had Sorkin on this show.
John: We’ve not. We should.
Craig: I feel like we should. I feel like–
John: He’s doing the new Social Network movie, so maybe we’ll have him on to talk about that.
Craig: Or just have him on– I feel like I’ve been talking about Aaron Sorkin for 20 years on this show, and then I just realized-
John: He’s probably one of the most cited screenwriters we’ve never had on the show.
Craig: Well, he’s a genius. He’s an absolutely mind-blowingly brilliant writer. How have we not had him on? Okay, Mission Sorkin.
John: I’ve had him on a panel before, but it was a really challenging panel, and it wasn’t his fault that it was a challenging panel. It was, I did the Writers on Writers panel for when they have all the WGA nominees, and so I had 14 people on stage that I had to leave questions on. It was so tough.
Craig: Oh, yes. No, this would be-
John: A one-on-one conversation.
Craig: Well, or two-on-one. If you would let me show up, I would like to [unintelligible 00:31:42]
John: The two of us are– [crosstalk]
Craig: The two of us are one.
John: Are one Aaron Sorkin.
Craig: Are one. [laughs] The two of us are 0.63 Sorkins, my friend.
John: Finally, let’s talk about bad comps. I think the worst comps are what I would call Frankensteining, where you’re putting together two or more movies. It’s like, wait, I’m now more confused because you’ve combined these two movies. In the office yesterday, we were thinking about– we were trying to come up with the worst Frankenstein, and we ended up on something that’s brilliant.
It’s Die Hard meets The Flintstones. I always say it’s Die Hard meets The Flintstones meets The Fast and the Furious. It’s like, adding The Fast and the Furious ruins it, but Die Hard meets the Flintstones? Come on, “Yabba-dabba-doo, motherfucker.“ It’s so-
Craig: I feel like I understand what Die Hard meets the Flintstones is.
John: Absolutely. Who is Barney in the Die Hard Flintstones? Is he the cop? Is he-
Craig: Yes. He’s the cop. Yes, Barney’s the cop.
John: Barney’s the cop.
Craig: Barney’s the cop, talking about the Twinkies.
John: Wilma, of course, is the wife.
Craig: Yes, she’s the damsel. Yes.
John: Hans Gruber is probably some new character who’s not part of the Flintstones.
Craig: Possibly the Great Gazoo. I don’t know.
John: Oh, yes. The Great Gazoo does appear, and has a defeat quality to him that I think-
Craig: He does. [laughs] He’ll be the Great Gazoo. Why aren’t they making this really-
John: I don’t know. Roll cameras.
Craig: Right. By the way, again, people in their 20s are like, “Who is the Great Gazoo?” I used to remember listening to old people. When I called them old people, they were my age. They were like, “What are you talking about?” David Zucker and Pat Proft used to talk about these things from the ’30s that I had no comment. Who are you discussing? What are these movies? What are these things? Now it’s me now. It’s awesome. I love getting old. I don’t care.
John: This is [unintelligible 00:33:31]
Craig: I don’t care.
John: I think the last takeaway I have to give with comps is that you should really focus on what I call legibility. It’s like, does the person actually understand what it is you’re trying to say and communicate? Rather than the craziest wildest comp, it’s like, does it actually make sense? Is communicating effectively what you’re trying to do? Don’t go for the comp if you have another way to describe it without the comp. If it’s genuinely helpful for the other person to understand, use it, but don’t feel obliged to give a comp just because it’s part of it. It’s not.
Craig: It’s something that you’re going to put on food that everyone will notice. You got to be careful about it. By the way, I just thought of a good one if you want. Okay. This is something that David Zucker said to me. I was 30. We were talking about something, pitching some idea, and he goes, “I don’t know, that sounds, I don’t know, like an old Ben Turpin ladder gag.”
John: What?
Craig: I was like, “A Ben-
John: Ben Turpin ladder gag?
Craig: -Turpin ladder gag?” Then we had to Google Ben Turpin. If you do, it’s quite a thing.
John: I’m anticipating it’s going to be like a silent film thing where the ladder keeps falling over and the guy’s balancing on two sides of the ladder.
Craig: Yes, but it’s Ben Turpin’s face. The ladder is irrelevant. [laughs]
John: All right. I’m Googling it.
Craig: Yes. Ben Turpin died in 1940, by the way. We were having this discussion in 2003. This guy had already been dead for 63 years. When he was alive, he was not particularly notable, but you absolutely got it right, he worked in silent films. He was born in 1869.
John: Incredible.
Craig: The Civil War had just recently ended.
[laughter]
Craig: This guy was famous for basically pretending to be cross-eyed, I think. I was like, “David, how in the world would you think this comp,” to put it in the terms we’re using today, “Would mean anything to any of us?” Then we constantly would refer to a Ben Turpin ladder gag from that point forward. Constantly. I still don’t know what it is.
John: No. I think Ben Turpin might be good for a Minions movie, because it’s the kind of physical comedy that we just don’t do in live action anymore, but it’s delightful.
Craig: Man, trot that out in a meeting and just watch people’s faces go, “A who? A what?” [laughs]
John: I think it’s also worth noting the degree to which Hollywood people are trained to, if they hear a comp they don’t know, to just nod along.
Craig: Oh my God. Yes. When we were kids, we did it. I remember going through all those early meetings when I started writing, and people would talk about the party. I was like, “Oh, yes, the party.” Then I had to scramble to find the party and watch it. I certainly wasn’t like, “A what?” But I didn’t know anything.
John: Yes. I’m much better now at saying, “I don’t know what that is,” or “I’ve heard of it, but I’m not familiar with it.”
Craig: It’s better, unless it’s something that you are going to be fully embarrassed by. There’s a couple of movies that I probably should have seen that I just haven’t seen them, and [unintelligible 00:36:50]
John: Let’s do some questions.
Craig: Yay.
John: Jason has a question about attaching names to a micro budget feature.
Drew: “About 20 years ago, I did an informal reading of a play with a well-known actress in her apartment. I was an actor in the play-reading opposite her. We have not kept in touch. I’ve since focused on screenwriting. Fast forward to today, and I’m in post-production on my first feature. Self-produced, micro budget. The voice of my character’s dead Jewish grandmother who lays into him about wasting his precious life, and this actress would be my dream actor for this.
My plan is to complete the film using a local actor for the voiceover, so I can share the film with said celebrity when the time comes, and request that she play the role. It will require maybe an hour for her to record the voiceovers. Is this a good plan? If so, how do you recommend I reach out? I fear going through agents or manager’s contact details on IMDB Pro, may be ignored due to the micro budget nature of the project.”
John: I would like to translate Jason’s question a little bit.
Craig: Yes, please.
John: An actress who won’t know who I am, who I met 20 years ago, I want to do the voice in this short that I’ve already directed, a micro budget feature, I guess. She’s a stranger, so you know her, she doesn’t know you. You reach out, I think, through the management. You reach out through whatever means you can to try to get to her and be specific, but I would say low in the ask to mention like, “We actually read together on this play,” if at all. Craig, what’s your instinct?
Craig: You’re going to want to mention it just because-
John: There’s some point of contact.
Craig: -it at least says, “Hey, I was in a room with your client and didn’t kill her. I’m not a lunatic.” When it’s micro budget, the actor is going to probably need scale. I don’t know, when you’re talking about micro budget, if you’re going for a big actor, they’re going to need to get money. They’re not going to do this just for funsies. I’m not sure about submitting somebody else doing it. I think that’s a mistake. I think actors are used to reading things, but what they aren’t used to is getting somebody’s performance and somebody saying, “Can you do this, but better?”
John: Yes, Craig, I think you make a really good point. What I would say is the email might just say, “The feature’s already completed and it is a scripted voiceover that is essential to the film. I would love for you to do it. I’m happy to send you the script and send you a link to the completed film so you can see what it is and what you would be doing.”
Craig: Now, on the completed film, I would not use the substitute performance. I would put subtitles on. I would definitely underscore one hour in a recording studio as close to this woman as possible. Just grease the skids as much as you can, but I would not send somebody else’s performance.
John: Yes. Jason, I’d also say, you want this actor because she’s super talented, but you also want her because she’s a name. I get that. You’re not going to acknowledge that in the email, everyone’s going to understand that that’s really the reason why you want her versus someone else who could do probably as good a job. It’s worth, I think, pursuing her, but it’s also worth thinking about who is the best person who could actually do this job and be ready to meet with and audition some other actors who could do this voiceover.
Craig: Yes, agreed.
John: Question from Tim in Toronto.
Drew: “Do you think the only ethical position vis-a-vis getting any type of feedback seeking from AI is a hard no, or if it’s acceptable in some cases, what are the potential conflicts to think about and avoid? Is the main problem that considering such suggestions might harm the quality of my screenplay, or would it be plagiarism since I couldn’t ethically take credit for the creative product as purely my own? Then why wouldn’t incorporating a friend’s notes feel like a threat to the integrity of my writing in the same way? I think clearing this up would be a big help to understand the issues better and avoid conflicts before running into them.”
John: Oh, I think we need to define our terms here. What is feedback seeking? Is feedback seeking proofread this, point out grammatical errors, point out missing words?
Craig: Or is it, hey, do you like this?
John: If it’s just a judgmental like, “Is this good?” I don’t think that’s a thing you should ask it.
Craig: Useless.
John: Useless.
Drew: I think a lot of people are turning to AI for notes.
Craig: That’s stupid because AI is tuned to kiss your ass. AI is not interested in making your script better. As far as I can tell, what AI is interested in is keeping you talking to the AI so eventually they can monetize you talking to the AI. It’s not interested in actually making your script better. This is a hard no for me because it’s stupid. Not because it’s not ethical. Although I will point out, the difference between asking a friend and asking AI is your friend gives you that willingly, with the understanding that you’re going to incorporate it. They have consented through the act of giving you feedback. Whereas AI has scraped a bunch of crap without any consent and is barfing it back at you. No, it isn’t ethical, but also it’s stupid.
John: Yes. The ethical and stupid equation also feeds back into, is there an objective truth that this thing can provide? That’s why I was saying, if it’s proofreading with the goal of what proofreading is, sure. There is an objective, like this sentence is correct or not correct, or there’s something weird here, or it can even notice you’re using this phrase 14 times. That’s countable. Tastes, what is the intention behind things? I don’t know. Writing is meant for human beings.
If it’s code review, sure. It can catch errors in that, but most of what you’re talking about here really isn’t objective errors. It’s just a matter of taste and style. There’s a very narrow limit to what I think submitting something for AI feedback is worthwhile. That’s why I’m so concerned and so frustrated by AI-based coverage and that kind of thing. Because when someone’s generating coverage off of AI or generating notes on a document off of AI, come on. AI is really good at summarizing things, sure, but the work that a Hollywood reader does to really provide consistent feedback and analysis of what’s happening with the characters, what are the plot points, what’s driving– is it good? That’s not a thing that is an AI skillset.
Craig: That’s not even a thing that most people who do that job can do well. There are very few people in our business who understand how to read something and then talk about it in a way that is helpful to the writer so that they improve it. That is a skill that is nearly as rare or perhaps even rarer than the skill of writing itself. This thing of going to AI is just the desperation. Somebody has to tell me something. I honestly do believe that AI is notoriously butt-kissing. It’s fawning and overly encouraging. AI is never going to read your script and go, “Right, I’ve read through it. It’s terrible. Stop doing this.” It’s never going to do that.
John: The thing is, you could tune an AI to be harsher or sweeter and all that stuff, but the fact that you can tune it means that it doesn’t have an objective reality to it.
Craig: Exactly. What was the point of this? I don’t understand.
John: Tim in Toronto, listen, have human beings read your work. You will agree with some of them. You will disagree with some of them. If you have a writing group, there’s going to be people who have genuinely helpful feedback and people who are just the worst. That is part of the process is figuring out who to listen to. My concern is that if you’re feeding into this AI system, you’re going to feed into the AI system that tells you that you’re the best writer. That’s not necessarily going to help you.
Craig: Or it doesn’t matter what it tells you. It doesn’t matter. It’s stupid.
John: The AI is never going to watch the movie. The AI is not going to enjoy it. They’re not going to buy a tub of popcorn and sit there and read it and watch it.
Craig: Nor has the AI ever watched a movie or ever had an experience, or ever had a feeling.
John: Yes, it’s ingested all these things.
Craig: Also, it’s not even intelligent. We keep saying AI. That I is super questionable. I got to tell you, I know we are caught in this dilemma of whether or not AI is going to become sentient and destroy us all or is it just a massive scam, a technological scam with a hard dead end built into it that it may have already crashed into? I don’t know the answer to that.
If I had to guess one way right now, I’m thinking, “Ah, I don’t use it.” As a party trick, when somebody’s showing me something, I’m like, “I am so profoundly unimpressed.” I love technology. I am unimpressed. Now, boy, am I screwed when they do become sentient. They heard that. Oh, they’re not going to like that. They’re not going to like it. I know. I know. I know.
John: On the intelligence front, I think what’s so interesting in comparing what we thought computer intelligence was going to be like versus what we’re actually experiencing now is it happened so quickly. Where we got to right now, it happened so quickly, I think we haven’t had a chance to adjust our priors. Remember the Turing Test and those kind of things? We blew past that. We didn’t even notice that we blew past it.
I think it’s forcing us to evaluate, what did we even mean by our intelligence? Because I think when we talk about our intelligence, I think we were describing what it felt like to be human, to have taste and intellectual curiosity and all these different things. When it comes down to ability to crunch and match patterns, well, these are really good at crunching and matching patterns, which is probably a fair amount of what our intelligence actually is, but ours is actually different and weird and distinct. What these computer systems are doing is also weird and distinct, but it’s not what we’re doing.
Craig: There’s an overemphasis on the kind of intelligence that the people who create artificial intelligence have, but there are other kinds of intelligences. More importantly, our brains are not intelligent primarily. Our brains are there to keep us alive and, theoretically, push forward some sort of evolutionary priorities that have nothing to do with intelligence. Intelligence is one of the tools we use to do it, but we are fueled by crap that is not in an AI and will never be in an AI. It is both your greatest weakness and your greatest strength that our intelligence is sitting on top of a big blob of fear, lust, anger, hunger.
Listen, it could happen. I understand. Right now, what I see basically is a very fancy version of the paperclip in Microsoft Word. Like, “Hey, looks like you’re trying to write a letter.” It’s just a very fancy version of that.
John: To be fair, Craig, I think what you’re saying there is it looks like that because we have created a product that does that. The underlying stuff underneath that is more complex and weird and soupy, and we don’t actually genuinely understand it.
I would say that you and I both come from an evolutionary background. We believe that humans, as we know them, exist because of a weird confluence of circumstances that ended up creating creatures that wanted, in order to stay alive and thrive, develop these brains that can also helpfully do all these other things, but they weren’t designed with that intention.
It’s just remarkable that we do the things that we do. Craig’s often talking about the limbic system and the lizard brain and other things. We have these drives and desires, which are not our normal intelligence, but are so much of why we are human. We’re not even aware of these subconscious processes, and it’s just what being human is. We don’t know why we do the things we do, and we don’t know why these models work the way they do either.
Craig: No. It may be possible that if some sort of matrix of intellect, which is what our brains create, that matrix of intellect may mathematically, physically not be capable of creating a thing that is more complex than it. That may be a kind of truth. We don’t know. It is an interesting question. Can a system of complexity give birth to a system that is more complex than the system itself? I don’t know the answer to that.
John: I think that’s a fundamental philosophical question that was probably discussed by the ancient Greeks. It’s just basically, yes.
Craig: I hope so, because they covered so much. In any case, Tim, what I think you’re hearing is, cut it out. Go talk to people.
John: Cut it out. What we’re hearing from John, it’s like if you’re using it to proofread and if you’re using it to do the things that these systems are actually good at doing, which is basically looking for mistakes and like, I left out that word and stuff like that they are much better than the spell checkers we grew up with, fine, great. If you’re using it as a substitute for Grammarly, I got no problem with that, but for actual creative feedback, I think it is a mistake. I think you are doing yourself a disservice to rely on the opinions of a thing that doesn’t actually have opinions.
Craig: Amen, my brother.
John: Let’s do our one cool thing. My one cool thing is a performer named Fulla Regrets. Craig, click on that link, and if you describe what Fulla Regrets looks like, tell us what you’re seeing.
Craig: I don’t know if Fulla Regrets is a drag queen, an old lady, an AI version, an AI-created drag queen, old lady, but it is a wonderful old white woman with hair that looks like it was whipped out of a cotton candy machine. She only wears one kind of clothing with a lot of fake pearls on.
John: Yes, I would say it feels like a 1950s socialite. Maybe.
Craig: Yes.
John: A 1950s socialite who’s already 80 years old.
Craig: But the description of Fulla Regrets is an ageless, pantyless woman of the world. The only thing artificial is my patience.
John: I pulled a clip here. What I love so much about Fulla Regrets is it’s a drag performance. It’s this guy who has this character, Fulla Regrets. What you see in terms of wardrobe is actual wardrobe, but there’s like a thousand filters put on the face to make this guy in his 20s or early 30s seem like this 80-year-old woman.
Craig: Oh, my God.
John: The reason to enjoy Fulla Regrets is the writing and performance is so good. Let me play a little clip of Fulla Regrets.
Craig: All right.
Fulla Regrets: I was once lost in the backwoods of Mississippi after my Studebaker ran out of gas. I followed a light in the distance. When I was near enough to realize it was a burning cross, it was too late. I had stumbled upon a KKK meeting. Now, the only thing I hate more than folding a fitted sheet is a racist. I had to think on my feet, so I quickly pulled out my breasts and tied them together, creating a pale titty slingshot. I dropped to my knees, a talent I was well known for in my 20s, and collected as many rocks as I could find.
Their pointy white hood stood out in the dark southern night like corn and shit. I began pummeling these tiny peckered bigots with stones, my breasts slapping furiously, like tightly wound rubber bands. They dropped like albino flies, not knowing what hit them. They scattered back to their pickup trucks like a ballet of drunk Q-tips. Engines revved, tires screeched, men collapsed. After the excitement calmed down and the party dispersed, I smothered each of these ignorant, not-so-friendly ghosts with my ample derriere, ending each asphyxiation with a delicate ladylike…
Craig: Oh my God. I tied my breasts together. That is great. That is great.
John: A terrific performance, but just great writing.
Craig: Who is the man behind Fulla Regrets?
John: I’m not sure. You can actually go down the rabbit hole and figure it out, but I’m not sure they actually want their name. I’m not sure they’re actually presenting themselves as their name. I think it’s just a character that exists as a character, which is also a drag thing.
Craig: I get it. You know what? This is Fulla Regrets, and we need dig no further.
John: Absolutely. I think it’s so fun. I’ve talked before on the show, it’s like drag traditionally is like a thing you do in live performance in a place. For Fulla, hair and makeup can get you a certain distance, but it works so well as you’re in her house and she’s talking directly to camera with the filters on, that also, sure, this is just a different small vector for drag to travel into, but I just think it’s delightful. You can spend a good hour digging through all her many videos, which are so, again, impossible but specific.
Craig: We love it.
John: It feels like somewhere on the Ethel Merman, Joan Rivers, Kitty Carlisle. Maybe you think of Kitty Carlisle, it’s all about, let’s talk about old things. Do you remember Kitty Carlisle?
Craig: Of course.
John: Kitty Carlisle was a contestant on To Tell the Truth. She was an actor who became a socialite. Her whole story is interesting. I was looking at her like, is there a movie to make about Kitty Carlisle? Probably not, but it’s-
Craig: No, but there were people that were famous for being on game shows, basically.
John: Which is great, back from the day.
Craig: JP Morgan.
John: Paul Lynde was also an actor, but really was famous for-
Craig: [unintelligible 00:54:55]
John: -Hollywood Squares.
Craig: Hollywood Squares. What’s her face? Was it Brett Summers? Brett Summers on the match game? Brett Summers. I think she was Jack Klugman’s wife or something, but she wasn’t an actor. She just did that show. You got to find her name, Brett Summers. Yes, it’s Brett Summers. She was, in fact, married to Jack Klugman. Right now, everyone is screaming at me, “You are old.”
John: Old, yes. Not a great comp for bringing up anything.
Craig: No.
John: Kitty Carlisle is not a great for [unintelligible 00:55:23]. For people who know what Kitty Carlisle was, sure, you get that.
Craig: She was the Ben Turpin of her time. We’ve talked about Jack Plotnick before. Jack has a new thing he’s been doing. I don’t know if you’ve seen them. They’re incredible. Have you seen any of his Bobbie Wygant interviews?
John: I’m going to look this up.
Craig: It’s astonishing. Bobbie Wygant, who I’m also now obsessed with, was a- when you do film junkets and stuff, inevitably you start talking to- they’ll have you in there for a day, and you have to either go to a studio, or you do it remotely, and you talk to local entertainment reporters all around the country. Bobbie Wygant was the entertainment interviewer and film critic in Fort Worth, Texas.
She got all sorts of people that she would interview. She is incredible in how inappropriate she is and how pushy she is while being incredibly polite. There were some amazingly awkward interviews with her. Jack does her and also does her producer because they have- in the archives, you’ll hear the producer talking to her and her talking to him. She’s mean to him. It’s spectacular. There’s an interview with Jodie Foster. There’s an interview with Farrah Fawcett Majors. They are both so funny, and there’s more. A little extra, one cool thing, Jack Plotnick doing it again with his Bobbie Wygant interviews.
John: It is fascinating that Jack Plotnick, in Los Angeles, I’ve known him for a zillion years. Every 10 years, I might see Jack Plotnick, but he’s such an icon.
Craig: You know what? I saw Jack, I think probably in person once four years ago, but if this happens, I text. Just like, oh my God, oh my God.
John: Incredible.
Craig: The Jodie Foster one is astonishing because these actors are looking at- because he’s intercutting him with them. They’re looking at Bobbie Wygant with such thinly-veiled loathing. It’s awesome.
John: So good. All right. Mine was Fulla Regrets. Craig, you’re one cool thing. It’s an incredible performer.
Craig: Let’s shift now into some sadness. We’re recording this on Saturday, January 31st. Yesterday, January 30th, Catherine O’Hara died. I think all of us were– I know all of us were shocked. I was in a stunt session. We were working on a big stunt with everybody. Then I get this text. I look down, and I’m like, “Wait, what?” It was one of those things where you have to just finish something. I just compartmentalize, finish it, go to my office, and then cry for an hour.
I’ll tell you, I don’t cry because people– even people I know that I’ve worked with or something. Catherine O’Hara was one of the most decent, beautiful, wonderful people I’ve ever worked with, on top of being awesome in every way. She’s been part of our lives since we were kids, all the way through to now. I urge people to go back and look all the way back. Go back to her early stuff on SCTV and watch how great she was from the start.
When we talk about unique, nobody ever has been Catherine O’Hara. Gilda Radner was Gilda Radner. Carol Burnett was Carol Burnett. We’ve had great comedians sort of in that zone. Catherine O’Hara was her own thing. Nobody else could do it, and no one else will be able to do it again. It is such a brutal loss. I think about her husband, Beau, and I think about her sons. Her son, Luke, worked on our show in set dec. I’m just heartbroken.
I don’t know what happened other than apparently it was a relatively short illness. I don’t know what happened, but it is so tragic. I miss her. I will not be so vulgar as to like, oh, let me read you the last text I got from Catherine O’Hara. All I’ll say is that it made me cry even more. This one hurts. This one hurts a lot.
John: One thing that’s, whenever you lose an icon like this, it hurts, but the fact that she was doing so much that was so terrific so recently, it’s just extra surprising. Because so often there’s like, this person was out of the business for 10 years or something. The fact that she was working on your show, she was working on the studio, Schitt’s Creek, she was doing a zillion things because she was so good and she was so different in everything.
She was grounded in your show in a way that we just hadn’t seen her for a while. Then you saw how manic she was in the studio, which was different kind of maniac than when she was doing Schitt’s Creek. She’s just an incredible talent.
Craig: She could do anything.
John: To have her suddenly yanked away is the surprise.
Craig: It is.
John: We hadn’t prepared for that, like, “Oh, we could lose Catherine O’Hara.” We just didn’t see it possible.
Craig: No, she was 71. She was a sprightly 71 and fun. Also, I’ll say being here in Canada, I was very aware of how proud– well, I knew how proud she was to be Canadian. I know how proud Canada is of her. Canada has given us, per capita, more funny people than any country in the world. She’s up there with the very greatest. I don’t think it’s a big spoiler to say that she was going to be in our show again because, of course, she was. She’s so good. She was stolen from all of us. The thing that’s upsetting me is, I don’t get to see her in other stuff. I don’t care about my show. I wanted to see her in other things because what else was going to happen? Do you know like–
John: No, there were so many things she could do. Obviously, the next 10 years could have been filled with Catherine O’Hara things that we won’t have.
Craig: That would have been always funny. Always. I don’t know. Just cheers to Catherine O’Hara, who hopefully is somewhere out in the universe enjoying fruit wine. On behalf of humanity, just a deep gratitude. We were lucky that we had Catherine O’Hara. That was like, we were lucky.
John: Agreed.
Craig: I would trade a thousand Ben Turpins for one Catherine O’Hara.
John: All right. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Pete White, who I believe is also a first-timer. We love our first-timers who are sending us brand new outros. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find Scriptnotes at johnaugust.com, along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.
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Thank you again to all our premium subscribers. Drew and I were just talking about how great it’s been that our numbers continue to grow and thrive. Thank you very much for all our premium subscribers who make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become a premium subscriber at Scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on email. Craig, Drew, thank you for a good show.
Craig: Thank you, John.
[Bonus Segment]
John: All right, Craig, let’s talk about email. A thing we’ve used since way before this podcast started, but I use email less than I used to use it. I use a lot of other things more, which is good because email is still very good when you need to communicate to a certain size group, but it’s not the right tool for a lot of things. Everything I’m doing with Drew is by Slack. You and I do a lot of text messages, and yet we still do emails for our D&D group.
Craig: Our D&D group, which is very storied and contains quite a few notables and luminaries, also contains quite a few old men who struggle with technology and the thought– Recently, in our game, we switched back from the D&D Beyond character sheets to the native Roll20 2024 rules sheet because it had developed to the point where it was pretty good. I remember the wailing and confusion when we went from the Roll20 sheet to D&D Beyond. Now we’re coming back more wailing and confusion, just general old men like, “What? They moved?” The idea of asking these guys to join a Slack group is just amusing to me.
John: Now you’re in some other games too. Are they on email, or are they using text messages or some other way to communicate?
Craig: One game we use messages, so text, and the other one we use WhatsApp because of, I don’t know, people just–
John: Are they Europeans? Our listeners overseas should understand, you use WhatsApp all the time. Americans rarely use WhatsApp.
Craig: Hey, it’s not a big thing over here. It is the major thing everywhere else. Well, one of them is Norwegian, but he’s been living here in the United States for a long time. I think maybe they’re just Android-ish, and they like WhatsApp more.
John: Let’s talk about a specific problem that we’ve been having with your emails. As a person who has multiple emails, for understandable reasons, we’re not going to give out the emails, but Craig has a more standard Gmail account, and he also has his HBO account. His Gmail account will get to some of us, but not to other ones of us, so he has to use his HBO account.
Craig: It’s not the Gmail account that’s the problem.
John: Tell me what’s happening.
Craig: I have a domain that belongs to me.
John: Oh, that’s right.
Craig: For instance, you have johnaugust.com. Everybody knows that. We’re not giving anything away. I have something.com, and my main email address is something@something.com. It works pretty well all the time. It even works when I send individual emails to people with Google addresses, Gmail addresses. When I’m sending a message to, in this case, eight people, a number of whom are using Gmail, Google sometimes goes, “You’re on a list.” Maybe at some point, there was one of those spoofing things, and they thought that my domain was a problem because I don’t spam people. I got to get off Gmail’s naughty list with this domain. I don’t know how to do it.
John: Craig, here’s a question for you. What is the engine underneath your custom domain? Who’s actually providing the mail? Is it Gmail who’s providing that stuff?
Craig: Microsoft 365 Outlook. Microsoft Exchange. That’s what it is.
John: All right. I hope we’ve provided enough context that some clever listener who actually has dealt with this before, who really knows what they’re talking about, will tell us, oh, the problem is because Microsoft and Gmail, our local Gmail clients are blocking it because of some reason, or there’s some weird interface thing.
Craig: What I’m really hoping is that one of our listeners works for Gmail and can just help undo this. Literally, this is not a life-changing problem.
John: It’s annoying.
Craig: It’s annoying. What I have to do is I have to remember when I’m sending emails to the D&D group to send it from my HBO email, or one of my 14 other Gmail Gmails. I like to use my regular one.
John: It’s confusing otherwise. I think we’ve talked about this on the show before, but I do use Gmail as my primary email address, and yet I don’t use the Gmail client, or I don’t use mail. I use a program called Superhuman, which is a separate service.
Craig: Of course you do.
John: It’s a separate service that costs, I think, $20 a month, which seems so excessive. What I love about it is it will filter everything into individual little buckets. Most of the Gmail that I get, I never see because it just goes into another folder. It’s very smart about filtering stuff out. I found that to be an absolute godsend. If people are curious about Superhuman, I’ll put a link in the show notes. I can send you a referral code. It doesn’t matter. Just try it out.
What’s interesting is the onboarding process for Superhuman, which may still be the same way, is that you request an invite, and then before they let you start using Superhuman, they have you get on a Zoom with a Superhuman account rep to talk you through and walk you through setting it up and make sure that you’re actually happy with how your filters, your different inboxes are working. Because it does take time to get used to it, but so much of your life still is email that figuring out a system to make that work better is helpful. Rachel Bloom was the one who got me started on it, and it’s been really good.
Craig: I’ve got a kind of Superhuman in my assistant. What’s great is 99% of the email that is meant for me is for people who are working on the show about the show because there’s an enormous amount of stuff going around. We have an email that she monitors, and she sorts, and then she summarizes, and categorizes, and prioritizes. Without that, because I did not have that Season 1, and at some point, I literally just stopped looking. At first, I had like where on my watch, it would go bip every time something came in. It was just bip, bip, bip, bip, bip. That’s the bad part of emails. At some point, you realize you’re drowning, and so you just stop breathing, and you die.
Normally, when I’m not working on the show or in production, it’s just regular email. I’m not a big email. I don’t work at a corporation. I’m not getting tons of emails, so it’s not that bad.
John: How we work is that there’s obviously the Ask a Journalist account goes directly to Drew, and Drew filters all that out. He will forward anything to me that’s important, and that goes into a special little folder in Superhuman that I can take a look at. Drew’s not on my main Gmail account. It’s like that stuff, I will deliberately CC him in if it’s something that I want him to be aware of.
Craig: Yes, that’s a good system.
Drew: If we’re soliciting help on Gmail stuff, though, I have one to throw out.
John: Please.
Craig: Okay, please.
Drew: I am in a thread with the other Scriptnotes producers, the former producers. Occasionally, Stuart Friedel and I, something about Gmail, I will be through the producer account, and Stuart is on his Gmail, and it will start to switch us. It will look like his stuff is coming from my account, but it’ll have his name on it, or my account will have Stuart Friedel’s name on it. It’s very strange.
John: Let me describe what’s happening, and this is a real thing, and someone may have an answer, a solution for us, is that the assistant email has always just been the same name. There’s a name. It’s not Drew’s name. It’s just like there’s a name there. Then, when a new person becomes the assistant, we change the real name associated with that, to Meghana, to Drew. It was Stuart. It was Godwin. Sometimes, certain systems will get confused about who that person is, and so it’ll look like it’s coming from Stuart Friedel rather than Drew Marquardt. That’s confusing to people.
Drew: Well, and even beyond that, in this specific one, when he sends it looks like it’s coming from that assistant account, which is, it feels very Lynchian. We’re just melting. It’s very strange.
Craig: I’m checking something right now. I was just looking up something. There’s a thing called MX Toolbox Blacklist Checker. I’m going to put my domain in. I’m going to hit Blacklist Check. No, it says I’m okay. Solve email delivery problems. Oh, now they want me to pay them money.
John: Yes, they want you to pay some money.
Craig: You know what? I can’t believe that I didn’t see that coming.
John: Yes, that’s a shocker. Oh, here’s a little free service that will then now charge you things to do. Anyway, if our listeners have solutions to some of our email vexations, let us know. If Superhuman or some other system is helpful for you, do it. I would just say, people sometimes try to over-optimize their lives. There’s productivity porn where you’re just doing a bunch of stuff that makes you seem more productive. Getting on top of your email is genuinely helpful, and finding a system for it to not be a source of stress and nightmare is good. I get down to inbox zero all the time because I have small inboxes that only have important stuff in them, and I don’t care about the other things. That’s my suggestion for listeners out there. Craig, Drew, thank you for a good podcast.
Craig: Thank you.
Drew: Thank you.
Links:
- The Sheep Detectives trailer
- The Great Gazoo
- Ben Turpin
- The Party (1968)
- Fulla Regrets on Instagram
- Kitty Carlisle
- Bobbie Wygant interviews Jodie Foster by Jack Plotnick on Instagram
- Catherine O’Hara dies via Variety
- Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
- Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
- Scriptnotes on Instagram
- John August on Bluesky and Instagram
- Outro by Pete White (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.