The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hey, this is John. We recorded this episode on Friday afternoon. In it, we talk about ABC’s decision to indefinitely suspend Jimmy Kimmel for his comments in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination. Then on Monday afternoon, ABC announced that Kimmel would be coming back to air on Tuesday. We decided to leave this segment as recorded because the broader implications are still the broader implications. I’ll be honest, the first half of the episode is a little grim because how could it not be?
Then in the second half, I promise we do get into short films and other evergreen topics. Enjoy.
[Music]
Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: You’re listening to Episode 705 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, what is the platonic ideal of the short film, and why should anyone make one? Then we’ll revisit our 2018 forecast of existential threats and update our predictions. Plus, we have listener questions.
Drew is off traveling the world this week. Luckily, we convinced Scriptnotes legend Megana Rao to fill in for him. Megana, welcome back.
Megana Rao: Thank you. I’m here again.
John: You never really left, but now you’re actually behind the control board rather than just at the desk.
Megana: Yes. I’m afraid I am revealing how desperate I am to hang.
Craig: I don’t think so.
John: Oh. No.
Megana: Okay, great.
Craig: No, I think what you’re doing is evoking and becoming the legend of Megana Rao. I like that you’re legendary now. In Dungeons & Dragons, things with legendary status, quite awesome.
Megana: Okay. I’ll take that.
John: Unique, special, highly sought after.
Megana: Very pretty,
John: You’re not an artifact.
Craig: Did you say pretty? [laughter] No. I’m not commenting on you. I’m saying–
Megana: No, classic in Dungeons & Dragons lore, legendary is gorgeous, stunning.
Craig: No. Although I like this idea now, what NPC would Megana Rao be? She’s definitely into being beautiful. I’m feeling possibly banshee. I always feel like they’re beautiful.
Megana: Do you?
Craig: Yes. In D&D, they float there. They’re like these ladies that float. Then they scream you to death.
Megana: Yes. That actually is accurate.
[laughter]
Craig: They scream you to death.
John: We will start our actual podcast here in a second.
Craig: Oh, sure.
John: In our bonus segment with premium members, Megana and I were talking, and I think we’re going to talk about intermissions, the role of intermissions in film and entertainment, and also stage management.
Craig: Oh, okay. I can think of my first film intermission. It’s burned in my brain.
Megana: Ooh, can’t wait to hear.
John: We are generally not a news-driven podcast, but this past week there were two bits of significant news that I did want to talk about. First, I want to talk about Robert Redford. Robert Redford passed away this week. Legendary, again.
Craig: Actual legend. Sorry, Megana. Actual legend.
Megana: No, I’ll give him that.
John: Actor and director. Of course, what I associate him most with is the Sundance Institute. He founded the Sundance Institute, named after Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Sundance, we think about the film festival, and independent film, especially in the US, would not be what it is without the Sundance Film Festival showcasing and highlighting independent film.
Craig: Robert Redford was someone who used his pretty privilege before anyone knew what pretty privilege was to actually achieve something. He was an incredibly handsome man and incredibly charismatic, plus a really good actor, and let’s not forget also an excellent director, even though I still think Raging Bull should have won. In any case, he was a Renaissance man. He absolutely channeled all of his charisma and pretty privilege into getting people to show up on that mountain to see a film festival, and he didn’t have to do that.
It wasn’t there to make him rich. It wasn’t really there to make anybody rich. It was just there to promote art. I haven’t seen anybody similar do anything since. Not like that.
John: No. I got to meet Redford a couple of times over the years. Part of Sundance is also the Sundance Screenwriters and Directors Labs. The labs are a phenomenal experience. When Redford wasn’t off shooting a movie someplace, he would come visit us at the labs. He would sit at the edges of meetings and contribute where he could. He was mostly listening and was always just so smart about trying to find who the next visionary filmmakers were going to be and how to support them in making their first and their second films.
So many of the guests we’ve had on the show came through the Sundance Filmmaker Labs.
Craig: Yes. He was a force for good. He actually achieved things. In our town, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, John, we are gushing with unproductive opinions. I was just at the Emmys getting my ass kicked. A lot of unproductive opinions [laughter] said there on stage, not going to move the needle. Not going to do a damn thing. People do like to talk in Hollywood, but Robert Redford did stuff. Hats off to him, and rest in peace.
John: Absolutely. The other bit of news was Jimmy Kimmel. As we’re recording this on Friday afternoon, the Kimmel’s late show is off the air, Late Night with Jimmy Kimmel. For international listeners who may not understand how late shows work in the United States, there are three big networks that each of them has a late show. Jimmy Kimmel hosts the show on ABC. He’s been doing that for more than 15 years.
Craig: Forever, as I can tell.
John: He was taken off the air extensively for comments made about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. If you actually look at the actual text of what he said, it was not inflammatory in any meaningful way.
Craig: It inflamed people. I don’t know if that qualifies as inflammatory. What we’re dealing with is the vestigial nature of broadcast television. Most of what we think about as television, we watch Netflix or Max, or even Disney+, and it’s streaming. Networks are still broadcast over the air. I actually looked this up. There’s still something like 18% of Americans who get their television through an antenna. Weirdly, there has been an increase in antenna use among millennials. Megana, explain.
Megana: Who? Where would I even find that?
John: My guess would be it’s folks who are getting their internet through some other way. They’re on some shared Wi-Fi network, and they want to watch TV occasionally.
Craig: They just don’t want to pay anything. It’s free. The hiccup here is that because it’s over the public airways, it is regulated by the FCC. The FCC, which we think of as an administrative body, which technically is nothing more than that, a regulatory agency, the appointees are political appointees. The FCC has been a football for a long time. People can call in and complain to the FCC, and the FCC can decide what complaints matter more than others. In this case, Disney had a couple of things going on. They had an affiliate uprising.
There’s a couple of companies that own a lot of stations that are affiliated with the ABC network. They also had the FCC getting cranky.
John: We should say those affiliates are attempting to merge, and they need supplemental approval to merge.
Craig: The affiliates are attempting to merge, which they are going to be allowed to do by this administration. ABC decided– it’s similar to what they did when Florida had their Don’t Say Gay thing. Disney just keeps stepping in it. I get it. On the one hand, they’re like the family brand, and they need to stand up. On the other hand, now everybody just hates them here in the business. If I’m Jimmy Kimmel, and I don’t know Jimmy– I talk to him once every year when I’m a celebrity phone-a-friend on, let’s be a millionaire, two or three.
What do you do if you’re him? Do you come back? Do you say, “Okay, yes.” In my mind, they’re like, “They’re going to suspend him for a week, and he’ll be back next week.” I don’t know.
John: We don’t really know. Again, we’re recording this on Friday afternoon. By the time you hear this on Monday afternoon or Tuesday morning, things could be vastly different. It’s moving so quickly that Megana and I went to the protest at ABC yesterday, which was organized at noon, and sort of last-minute, we showed up there. Megana, why did you want to go?
Megana: I wanted to go because I feel like you read so much of this news in a vacuum, and I just think it’s important to show up when you can show up. This is a thing where it’s like a First Amendment violation. The other thing that is more concerning to me is the Nexstar television channel operator and their merger with this other company, and how powerful they’ll be. I don’t know how we protest against that.
Craig: I’m not sure it is a First Amendment violation. This is part of the problem.
John: Is it an indirect First Amendment violation? Because Carr and the FCC had threatened to pull licenses unless they did X, Y, or Z.
Craig: They didn’t do that. That’s actually why the FCC is there. You don’t have the right to use the public airways to say whatever you want. You have to conform to whatever. This is why I don’t like the fact that broadcast networks are there. By the way, broadcast networks have been doing this forever. Ask the Smothers Brothers. You can’t. They’re dead. The Smothers Brothers were taken off the air in 1969 because they kept talking about the Vietnam War in a way that the government didn’t like.
They were taken off the air and taken off the air at the height of their popularity. This is a thing. What’s going to happen between this with Jimmy Kimmel and the fact that Stephen Colbert lost his job, which is insane. Obviously, that was designed to help the CBS Paramount merger go through with Skydance. Who’s going to want to do a late-night talk show on network television now, other than Jimmy Fallon? It’s a real problem.
John: Yes. Obviously, you can pull that down and say that “Oh, there are economic factors at play as well. The late-night shows are not profitable the way they used to be, and all that stuff, whatever.”
Craig: They’re profitable.
John: At least they had the fig leaf of saying, “Oh, Colbert, it’s for business reasons, not for any other political reasons why we’re doing it.” Here, they’re not attempting to do that. It was clearly in reaction to this uproar, this manufactured uproar over.
Craig: It’s a manufactured uproar. It is also a manufactured uproar that follows a long-standing hatred of Jimmy Kimmel from people on the right. They don’t like the fact that he makes fun of Donald Trump because they’re incredibly sensitive. You know the people with the F Your Feelings T-shirts? Yes, they’re super sensitive. I suspect we may be looking at the end here of broadcast late-night television because I don’t think anybody good will ever want to do that job.
John: How does Saturday Night Live come back in the fall?
Craig: Saturday Night Live never stops coming back. Saturday Night Live is forever. They aren’t going to do a sketch that makes fun of Charlie Kirk. It’s not really what they do. They’ll make fun of ABC.
John: Yes, but if you look at the comment that was made, it wasn’t making fun of Charlie Kirk, though. It was–
Craig: I completely agree. I feel like Saturday Night Live gets a historical pass. They legitimately do make fun of everybody, but late-night talk– Also, Saturday Night Live is incredibly profitable. Late-night talk shows, I think you’re just going to see that it’s once a week on Netflix now. It’s once a week on Apple+.
Megana: Like with John Oliver.
Craig: John Oliver on HBO. John Oliver can do whatever he wants. Now, if Paramount buys Warner Brothers, I don’t think that’s–
John: Deal approved, yes.
Craig: The point is, HBO doesn’t have to worry about the FCC coming after them. The FCC can’t do a damn thing about HBO.
John: All right, let’s get some more follow-up. We have a Scriptnotes book coming out on December 2nd, and around that time, you and I want to do a live show or maybe two live shows in Los Angeles to promote the book.
Craig: Sure.
John: A question I have that I would love our listeners to help us answer is, should we do one live show on the East Side, or should we do two live shows, an East Side show and a West Side show?
Craig: Do I get a vote?
John: You get a vote.
Craig: One show.
John: Okay. [laughter] The argument for two shows is that if we could just do Dynasty Typewriter, it’s incredibly small, and it’s great if we can sell it out, but we can’t fill that many seats, and there’s probably more people who actually want to come and get a copy of the book. That’s fine.
Craig: You’re thinking Shrine Auditorium.
[laughter]
John: Yes, so Shrine Auditorium should be able to hold everybody.
Craig: You got better.
John: Basically, we need to know how many people want to come.
Craig: Get a sense of–
John: Get a sense of that. There’s now a little tally form that’s up. We’ll put a link in the show notes to it. Some people can click and say, “Oh, I want to come to a show on the East Side. I want to come to a show on the West Side. We get a sort of overall headcount. We’ll figure out whether we’re doing one show, if we’re doing two shows, and what size venue we need if we need a bigger place.
Craig: We could do one show on the West Side, too, if most people are on the West.
John: Exactly. That’s what I’m saying. We could do both.
Craig: Do you know what your mobster name is?
John: What’s this?
Craig: Johnny Two Shows.
John: Johnny Two Shows.
[laughter]
Craig: Johnny Two Shows.
John: For either of these events, we’d be partnering up with a local bookstore, and your ticket would get you a signed copy of the book. That would be probably a $32 ticket, which gets you a free copy of the book.
Craig: Oh, I like that number, 32. Very specific.
John: We have a follow-up on verticals. It’s a long one. I think probably I’m going to post this on the blog instead because, man, it’s a long one.
Craig: Those things.
John: Peter had a writing job on a vertical and actually had a better experience than the last guy we talked through. He ended up making about $15, $40 a week with benefits, which is much lower than what a WGA rate would be. Well lower. Yes. Had a reasonably good experience. He was not a WGA writer, which is good because a WGA writer shouldn’t be working on these things.
Craig: It would be against our rules.
John: It would be against our rules. I’ll put this on the blog so people can see what his experience was. Last bit of follow-up. I sent this to you yesterday, and I want to hear your reaction live on the show. Jerry wrote in, “I saw something on Instagram that I thought you and Craig might have some fun with, a digital D&D die. Basically, it is a oversized die that you roll, and it always comes with the screen side up, and that gives you the number result.” What was your impression of this D&D die?
Craig: I wanted it to do something else ultimately. I did enjoy their video because they were so excited as they were doing it.
John: They were rolling a die for no purpose.
Craig: Fighting over it and rolling a die for no purpose. I’m like, “Okay, now what happens? Now what happens?” They just kept rolling the die. There are lots of gimmick dies. What does that die do? You have to roll a die, and then you see a number. Isn’t that just what rolling a die does anyway?
John: I didn’t have sound turned on for the video, but if I were building this product, which I’m not intended to ever build, I think if you roll a 20, a critical hit, it should make a very cool sound. Then, like a sad trombone, if you roll a one.
Craig: Okay, but I just didn’t see the purpose. There are things where you got to put a little screen in there and a little random number generator. That’s not hard. I don’t know. I can’t imagine being excited. Hardcore nerds, and I think you and I qualify, my friend, when it comes to these things, we’re more interested in purchasing strange manufactured dice.
John: You and Chris Morgan and some other folks are. I could not give a crap about fancy dice.
Craig: Absolutely, nor should you. If you do, you’re looking for strange metal.
John: The lab diamond.
Craig: Yes, tungsten and weird designs that are dwarven or elvish. Look at Megana. She’s like, “Oh my God.”
Megana: This is like your crystals.
John: Yes, and literally, they are crystal dice. You have to be so careful with it because they can’t roll against each other because they’ll chip.
Craig: These are like your crystals.
Megana: Do you have one for your birth month, Craig?
Craig: No, I don’t even know what my birthstone is. What’s my birthstone? I was born in April. I’m terrified that it’s diamond. I think it might be diamond.
Megana: Yes, you’re an Aries.
John: It is the diamond.
Craig: It’s diamond. I can’t afford diamond dice.
John: No one can.
Megana: Dungeons & Dragons dice. That’s incredible.
Craig: No one’s made diamond dice.
Megana: Lab-grown.
Craig: What?
Megana: A lab-grown diamond dice.
Craig: Think of how big the– Each diamond has to be the size of the Hope Diamond. [laughter] Because they’re enormous. It’s like an 800-carat diamond is your D20. It’s been like, careful. I don’t. I don’t.
Megana: Now people know what to get you for Christmas.
John: It would be really challenging to engrave the diamond.
Craig: You have to engrave it with another diamond? [laughter] How do you even see what it is? Chris Morgan has the shiny, crystally glass. They’re beautiful. They reflect a million bits of light.
John: Incredibly hard to read.
Craig: Hard to read. The D4, which is a pyramid, is pointy enough to hurt you.
John: Yes, you could drop a lot of the D4.
Craig: Yes, I like that one.
John: That is not an existential threat, but let’s get to our actual meta topic about existential threats.
Craig: I’m going to call that segue man.
John: Megana, would you read what Donna wrote?
Megana: Donna writes, “Hi, John and Craig. I’m still deep in my quest to finish all your back episodes, and today I listened to Episode 334, Worst Case Scenarios. In it, you might recall you talked about a plague and AI, among other potential screenwriting death knells. Since both of those things are now part of our reality, I wondered if it’s worth revisiting this idea from eight years ago. To see how much more real the threats you named feel, and if there are any new ones, and if you would up your percentages on their likely effects on screenwriting careers.”
John: Great. I went back and looked at the transcript for 334. This is pre-pandemic, pre-Zoom, and we were really close on a lot of things. We talked about scenarios in which there’s no screenwriting happening anymore because the world has so fundamentally changed. I’m walking dead and sort of post-apocalyptic.
Craig: Zombies.
John: The luxury of screenwriting. It’s just not a thing that anyone would do. We also talked about economic collapse, some of the Great Depression, but of course, there were still movies being made during the Great Depression.
Craig: Loads.
John: We talked about scenarios in which there were still movies, but screenwriters were no longer being hired, either because they were all being hired from overseas, or there would be AI. For 2018, we were dead on with AI. You said, “I think AI, I’m just guessing here, will never get better than mediocre.” Mediocre would be amazing, by the way. The fact that a computer could be a mediocre writer would be amazing. That was Craig in 2018.
Craig: I think I nailed it on that one. Currently, AI is amazingly mediocre, and that is amazing.
John: Yes. I would say that the written material generated by AI is much better quality than I would have assumed, and yet it does not have a human quality. That’s a challenging thing to achieve.
Craig: Not yet. No.
John: We talked about whether the WGA could cease to exist, perhaps being eliminated by a government fiat. Lots on the table. We were squishy on our timeframe for things. Between 5 and 20 years, which is a big range considering how fast things are moving.
Craig: Sure. What year was this?
John: 2018?
Craig: Here we are seven years later.
John: Things are still around.
Craig: I think for a couple of guys predicting things, it’s not too bad.
John: You had said our percentage chance for civilization-ending events was between 2% and 5%. Is that a range you still would hold yourself in?
Craig: Yes.
John: An economic event that ends all movies. We were at one–
Craig: Sorry, I’m going to go up on that, actually. I’m going to go 5% to 10% because of AI. If they continue to shift, for instance, the control of weapons of mass destruction to systems that are even vaguely AI, much less fully AI, then we are entering a danger zone. I’m going to go up on that one.
John: Yes. I haven’t read the book yet, but–
Craig: I’d say 7.5%.
John: By the time this comes out, everyone will be talking about If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, which is a new book about superintelligence and why we need to avoid superintelligence. I think I wasn’t sticking AI in the catastrophic risk back in 2018. I certainly would put it very high there.
Craig: Have I talked about Douglas Hofstadter and his whole thing about AI?
John: No. What’s this?
Craig: Douglas Hofstadter is a brilliant man, professor. He wrote the book Gödel, Escher, Bach, which is a famous rumination on art and early artificial intelligence. He always felt that it was never going to get better than a certain thing. He was always the guy who was like, “Everyone, please stop worrying.” Now, I read [laughs] an entry of him where he said, “It’s all I worry about every day. It’s all I think about every day, and I’m pretty sure we’re doomed.”
That doesn’t feel good.
John: No, not a bit.
Craig: I’m not saying he’s necessarily right, but I do marvel at the stupidity of the way we’re just all rushing towards this because I don’t even know why we’re doing it. They keep telling me that AI is going to make things better. Every stupid app I have is like, “Now we can do AI.” I’m like, “For what? I don’t need it.”
John: I think you need to distinguish between cheap commercial consumer applications of AI to the hard science, the mathematics, the engineering kinds of things that it does demonstrate some real capabilities to in ways that are both useful, but also much more dangerous. Those are the real concerns. We shouldn’t go too deep into this in this podcast because it’ll go way off the rails. Yes, you do have to be concerned both in what the current systems can do and how the destabilizing and bad effects of them, but also be mindful of a meteor that’s coming, which is–
Craig: We do always have to worry about the meteor. The only thing that gives me hope about any of these things is that there is a wall, a wall we can’t see that is inherent to the way that these things function. Once they hit that wall, they can go no further. There is that AI may begin to feed on itself and just create recursive slop and thus suicide.
John: I’m not convinced that wall exists.
Craig: We’ll find out.
John: I don’t want to find out. [laughter]
Craig: You’re going to.
John: An economic event that stops all movies. We’d said 1%. Will bad economic events happen? Almost certainly. I think we’re headed towards one.
Craig: An economic event to stop movies?
John: I think we’re headed to a bad economic time, but will that stop movies? No.
Craig: We’re always headed to a bad economic time and a good one. That’s inevitable. Man, if the pandemic couldn’t kill movies, at this point, I’m going to go ahead and say they are immortal. They just seem immortal.
John: International writers taking all of the domestic writers’ jobs.
Craig: No, it doesn’t seem to be happening at all.
John: It’s not happening either. AI doing the job of screenwriters. You said 1%. I didn’t give a percent back in 2018. I think we will see examples of material that’s being generated by these machines doing some of the stuff that screenwriters would normally do. I think that’s bad, but I don’t think it’s catastrophic for the industry. I think if we survive AI, screenwriters will survive AI as well. Because so much of what we do is not just sticking words after each other. It’s actually being able to intuit what people need, what this movie feels like.
It’s being able to predict how this will actually work on a screen.
Craig: Yes. Also, I think humans are required to create things that people didn’t know they wanted. That’s the big advantage we have. We just invent things that no one realized. One thing that’s helped shore this up is that the Writers Guild, which still exists, has made it so that companies really can’t use AI.
If that all collapses, I suppose that’s the end of that. I’m going to put that at 5% now. It is encouraging to note that in this era of AI obsession, no one’s really going, “Hey.”
The con artists and the startups are all like, “We can do–” but nobody that actually runs these companies and makes money, no serious people are saying, “Let’s have ChatGPT write a screenplay.”
John: That’s absolutely true. You see things like the Lion’s Fate of it all, no one’s talking about end-to-end this stuff. Even in 2018, we were talking about the risk of a new form of entertainment that’s coming out of either AI or some other way that basically takes the place of movies and television, or the time and attention, which I think is a genuine worry. I think it’s absolutely possible that something else is just so compelling that you don’t want to sit and watch a movie for two hours, or you don’t want to watch even a half-hour TV show, the way that TikTok can suck up all of your time.
Craig: That’s a real thing. I don’t think people quite yet understand how much time is going to be taken up by Grand Theft Auto VI. I’m not joking. Grand Theft Auto VI-
John: Production will plummet.
Craig: -is going to hit our time consumption as a civilization.
John: Is it 2027 now?
Craig: I thought it was 2026, but late. We’ll have to check. When it happens, it’s going to be insane.
John: Traffic accidents will drop temporarily, but then increase.
Craig: [laughs] After you play GTA, you get in your car, you have to just remind yourself, “I’m not allowed to hit pedestrians.” Also, red lights are serious. They’re not suggestions.
John: No, you really have to [crosstalk]
Craig: You have to actually stop at the red light because in Grand Theft Auto, nobody stops. If you stop at a red light, you’re an idiot. You got places to go. You know how you get away from the police, Megana?
Megana: I do not.
Craig: While they’re chasing you pull into some sort of auto body shop, close the garage, repaint your car, you roll out, police never know. It’s not how law enforcement works, actually.
Megana: It’s kind of clever.
John: Absolutely.
Craig: Works in [crosstalk]
John: You got a good heist movie. Lastly, talked about the end of the WGA back in 2018. You said a 4% chance that there’s no WGA in the future. I would increase that a bit. I just feel like there’s, with the anti-union sentiment and the sense of some way to say that it’s anti-competitive, whatever, that the existence of unions is anti-competitive, by government fiat, I think there’s a reason why WGA–
Craig: Ultimately, it comes down to the courts. If the courts decide that the NLRB can be overturned or whatever, which they’re contemplating, then, yes, I could see the end of unions. The problem with the end of unions is that there are going to be strikes. Unions aren’t going to go quietly. What you don’t want if you are running a government is all the unions striking all at once, because then it is cats and dogs sleeping together in a nightmare. I think they’re going to want to allow unions. Let’s not forget that unions are also useful to businesses.
John: Absolutely. Predictability.
Craig: Predictability, and they create both a floor and a ceiling, which is helpful. The ceilings are great for business. Sure, Amazon, Meta, all these guys, they hate labor unions. They’re also trying to hire people for $500 million. Do you know what I mean? Maybe they should rethink their stupid obsession with no unions. I’m going to put it at 5%.
John: All right.
Megana: All of your percentages are so low.
Craig: Yes. Well, because they should be.
Megana: Is the world ending?
Craig: If you say there’s a 50-50 shot the WGA won’t exist in whatever five years, that goes in deadline. That’s a big deal.
John: Yes. Even low percentages can be absolutely terrifying. I was reading a blog post. I don’t see if I can find a link to it. It was basically arguing that if you think there is even a 50% chance of this terrible thing happening, you should reasonably dedicate all your efforts to stopping that thing. By putting it at 5%, we’re acknowledging that this is a serious concern, but not a “stop everything until this is addressed” concern.
Craig: As John and I know, because we play D&D constantly, what we’re really saying is you’re rolling a 1 on the D20.
John: That happens.
Craig: All the time.
Megana: Yes. This is really nice because I have a friend who’s constantly saying that our careers won’t exist in five years.
Craig: Maybe don’t be friends with that person. They’re annoying. How does that help you?
John: It’s not helpful.
Megana: It doesn’t. It keeps me up at night.
Craig: Right. Maybe, no. Maybe, are you getting anything good out of that friend?
Megana: Yes.
Craig: Okay. Then you can tell them that you have a need, and your need is for them to stop it.
Megana: You guys think that screenwriters will be around for–
John: I do. I was actually talking about doing a New York Times opinion piece for the book. That may actually be a good topic. Like, screenwriters will still exist, assuming anything exists.
Craig: Only issue is that the machines may use that as exhibit number one when we’re put on trial and beheaded.
John: We’ll have to be careful with our words, but fortunately, we are wordsmiths. We can figure it out.
Craig: We should use ChatGPT to write that.
[laughter]
John: Good Lord. Are there new threats? I was thinking of some threats that didn’t occur to me in 2018. It was American authoritarianism. We were in the first Trump administration, but it was inept. They were trying to do bad things, but they couldn’t actually pull them off very well. I certainly underestimated the ability of motivated people to just wreck systems.
Craig: Yes. The American authoritarianism is at a high point. We’ve been here before. I always like to put things in political perspective because people think this is unprecedented. It is not. Although the manner in which it is unfolding is particularly stupid and worthy of contempt. Yes, it is a more concerning problem now, I think, than it has ever been before in my lifetime.
John: The actual– we were talking about with the Kimmel, if you want to call this government censorship, it feels like the ability of the federal government to stop speech that it doesn’t want to happen is a real thing. Complying in advance, like, we’re not going to greenlight this thing because we know it’s going to piss off something.
Craig: Yes. In the past, I think people that operated on broadcast networks were very careful. Johnny Carson never said anything that was going to get him kicked off the air. Everybody behaved with this decorum. Over time, all of us, including obviously our ridiculous president, we’ve lost all sense of decorum everywhere. Now, I’m not suggesting that Jimmy Kimmel exhibited a lack of decorum. I don’t think he did, but because we are all collectively playing it less safe, trouble is afoot.
We have an administration that is laser-focused on stuff that doesn’t matter. They are just, wow, they really need to deal with this Jimmy Kimmel problem, but not say the fact that millions of Americans are hungry. There is still an opioid crisis. Real estate’s getting stupid again. I could run down a long list of things. They laser-focus on picking up eight guys outside of a Home Depot. Wow, thank you for solving that problem.
John: Other things I would add that weren’t on my radar in 2018 would be international blockades. Our film and television industry is our biggest export, and it’s because the rest of the world wants to see our things. They don’t have to want to see the rest of our things. They could put up prohibitions to stop that from happening. If we lose the international box office, our industry changes.
Craig: Yes. We got a little bit excited about how much money was coming in from China, and that became a whole thing. Let’s take a beat for a second and point out that Hollywood, while decrying the state of affairs in the United States and censorship and all the rest, willingly, thrillingly dealt with repressive China forever, thrilled to give them censored versions of things. They censor our work in the Middle East. My show is censored when it airs in the Middle East. It makes me insane.
When I look at Hollywood wringing their hands over Jimmy Kimmel, I’m sorry, I just can’t help but think, “We don’t have clean hands here in this business.”
John: We have an expectation that when I turn on the TV, I get the real thing. [laughter] I get the real source.
Craig: You here as a privileged American, should get what you want.
John: Yes, absolutely. It’s our pretty privilege. Lastly, in 2018, I wasn’t thinking about actual war being a possibility. I do think it’s a significantly higher percentage chance that we’re in an actual war situation now than we would have been in 2018. Do you disagree?
Craig: I currently am going to lower my, because we are in an isolationist stance and a hard isolationist stance. The most hard right of the right, which seems to be the force that’s pulling things, is, as it has always been, isolationist. If this were 1999, I would say, “Oh, there’s a 40% chance we’re going to be sending troops, perhaps under the guise of NATO, into Ukraine.” There’s currently a 0% chance we do that now.
John: Yes, but I would say the odds that we have military action inside our borders is significantly higher than ever before.
Craig: That, I’m not sure what to call it exactly. That would just be military repression within the United States.
John: Let’s move on from this grim topic to something more constructive, which should be short films.
[laughter]
Craig: That is, whatever the opposite of segue man is pivot man.
John: Ian wrote in. Megana, can you read what Ian wrote?
Megana: Ian writes, “In the last few months, I’ve started resurrecting an animated short that I started a decade ago. I would love to hear your thoughts about short films. I found it very challenging to find the right balance of telling a story that is full and compelling, but simple enough to get across in 10 minutes. I would love to know what you all think makes a great short film, as opposed to a feature. Are there any structure or character considerations that you think are especially important in a short, especially in a case where there is no dialogue?”
John: All right. This is just a great question for me because I gave a presentation a couple months ago about short films specifically. I had to really think about, “Oh, what do I mean by short films? What are the characters that are different?” I’m going to run through some of these, but then I would love to have a conversation with you, Craig, about what you feel like. My basic premise is that short films are like jokes. They have setup, they have development, and they have payoff.
They need to have all three things, whether they’re funny or whether they’re horror or whatever the nature of them is. They are like jokes in that way. That setup is meeting your hero and their deal, which has to happen very quickly. Development is the change and the escalating consequences. That payoff is the release of tension that happens over the course of it.
Basically, every good short film you’re going to see is going to follow that basic pattern because that’s what your expectation is with a short film.
They’re not small versions of long movies. They don’t have three acts. They get right to it. They have ruthless compression. You open them as late as possible. You use images instead of exposition wherever you can. You’re writing a postcard, not a book. You have to frame everything around one question, one dilemma. There are no subplots. There are no supporting characters. You have to make sure you are showing versus explaining. It has to be even more so than most movies. You need to be able to understand what’s happening if you didn’t have the sound on.
It just has to really unfurl in a way that you quickly get what the question is and what the resolution of the short film is. Having watched the Academy shorts for so many years, the best ones do follow this. There’s some other ones that are like, “Why is this in there?” They’re tedious and they’re 25 minutes long, but the best ones do follow this pattern.
Craig: I like that. Like a joke, like a song. They are very focused. Ian, animation is great for short films. Ian is working in animation. One of the reasons why is because animation tends to be pure story, in no small part, because it’s expensive. Every frame costs something. You want to make sure it’s dense, calorically dense, gets to the point, delivers. Short films often do have ironic endings, twist endings, surprise endings. They also do give you space to do things without dialogue.
When you look at a movie like Flow, which is not a short film, they were able to do that without dialogue the whole way because animation is so evocative that way. WALL-E, very little dialogue until suddenly there’s a lot. Yes, in a short film, you have a chance to be a limerick, a song, a joke, whatever you want to call. Look at the other short forms of other things. Short stories, which are some of my favorite stories, are great lessons for anyone making a short film. Read Shirley Jackson.
John: The three short films I want to steer, Ian, and our listeners to, first is Lights Out, which is a horror short that later became a feature. It’s such a simple premise of there’s a monster that comes every time you turn the lights out, and it gets closer and closer. Paperman, which was, I think, probably won the Oscar. Black and white short film, no dialogue, gorgeously done. Then The Long Goodbye, which is a Riz Ahmed short film. I don’t remember if he directed it or not, but he stars in it. It just seems like a slice of life, family, and a house, and then terrible things happen.
The setup and payoff is brilliant. Examples of three very different short films, but they still have that core theme, which is that they’re very clear in what they’re trying to deliver. They’re not subplots. They’re not other things. It’s not trying to set up a bigger world. They are contained within themselves.
Craig: I think it’s good for people to consider that even though it seems like making a short film is easier than making a feature film because it’s short, the demands narratively are higher. You don’t have any wiggle room. You don’t have time to coast. You don’t have moments to luxuriate. Everything has to be intentional. Everything has to get you closer and closer to that ending, which must be a big punch to the face, a big laugh, a big cry, whatever it is.
John: That ties in very well to the question from James here.
Megana: James says, “I’m directing my first short in a couple months. I’ve spent the year saving for it and tried to think carefully about the script. I know it’s pretty good, but can’t help preoccupying myself with how I hope it might sell me. How can I validate its existence apart from festival success? I want to believe in the magic of just making a picture, but the immense financial and energetic resources required cause me to be anxious rather than excited to do more of what I like.”
John: Basically, I think James is trying to make a calling card film. It’s making a short film that will announce himself to the world. While I understand that instinct, he needs to actually just make sure that the short film he’s making is the best short film he can possibly make. That feels like he’s mistaking the outcome of the process and the actual aim of this thing.
Craig: There’s a little bit too much good therapy work and self-love in that. [laughter] Honestly, he’s worried about it being valid. No, think incredibly practically. It is a business. It’s an investment. It is a lot of money. There is nothing inherently valid about a short film. It’s either good, medium, bad. Yes, you do need to make it good. The anxiety you’re feeling is perhaps tied to the fact that you got a lot riding on this. Do the work ahead of time to stress-test it. Sit down with some folks, read it through.
Shoot a really simple version of it on the iPhone without any props or lighting or anything, and then edit that. That costs literally nothing except time and some friends who might be willing to help. Is it good? Treat it like business. It’s business. This is your career.
John: Here’s where I want to push back a little bit about “it’s business.” It’s not business in the sense that you’re going to make money off of this, because you will not make money off the short film. What you will hopefully do is make something that is so good that people want to meet with you and talk to you about doing other projects.
Craig: That’s the business.
John: That’s the business.
Craig: That’s why you’re putting money into it. You can’t put money into it just so that it exists. That’s not enough.
John: A short film, though, is also a chance to experiment, to learn. It’s a great education in how things go from being on the page to actually being on a screen. You’ve got to celebrate that as well. I look now at so many content creators who are doing stuff for TikTok or for Instagram Reels or whatever or YouTube. They’re not quite making short films. They’re doing something else that’s orthogonal to it. It’s using the same equipment but not doing the same kind of stuff.
Friends of mine did this program with a bunch of big YouTube people, where they went off and made narrative short films. They found it very difficult. It was a similar skill but not quite the same skill. Those people did have real talents of being able to understand shot by shot by shot by shot how stuff can work and cut together. Listen, James, I know you have a vision for this that’s going to put you on a path to this place. I just wouldn’t focus on that as being the main thing you’re working on with this is basically you want to do this because you want to make something good that people will watch and be entertained by.
If you do something that’s really good, it’s going to get your career moving ahead. You’ve got to focus on what is this thing, what is the thing itself, rather than what is the outcome of it.
Craig: Yes. Making it good implies that it maybe won’t be good. You have to let that in. This is really important. I think that there’s this toxic positivity thing that happens where people are like, I had an idea and therefore– Maybe it’s a bad idea. I can tell he is because he’s scared. That’s the best news of all. That fear, that’s useful. It’s useful fear. It’s telling you something. Listen to it.
John: We have one last one that’s on topic here. This is Matt from Boston.
Megana: Matt writes, “I’m an emerging screenwriter who’s written a handful of feature scripts, some of which have received interest from managers and production companies. I recently received an email from a producer asking if I have a concept trailer for one of my scripts. In the email, the person explained they produce concept trailers for writers who have high-scoring, unproduced scripts and are looking for a new way to cut through the noise and get their projects the attention they deserve.”
Craig: Oh God.
Megana: “I understand the usefulness of directors such as Damien Chazelle with Whiplash creating proof-of-concept short films, but I’m wondering how helpful creating a concept trailer would be for a screenwriter. I believe the focus should remain on writing and developing the best script possible. Curious to get your thoughts on this.”
John: Two separate things here.
Craig: Just so I’m clear, somebody emails him back and goes, “Hey, you know what you should do? You should pay us.” That’s like when you get an email that says, “Congratulations, we want to include you in the who’s who of America. You give us $1,000, and you can be in the–” just a rip-off. That’s just a straight-up con artist rip-off. I hate these companies that prey on people. I loathe them. Loathe bottom feeders.
John: Let’s acknowledge that, set that aside. Don’t pay this producer person. Let’s talk in a general sense about concept trailers or little short films that show the proof-of-concept for something. I think they can be valid, especially for something that you realistically could shoot yourself, that you’re trying to raise money for to shoot as indie film. I think it makes sense if that’s a thing you actually want to do. What I worry about is that we start to create a whole bunch of other auxiliary industries for these people. Not only do you have to be a really good screenwriter, but you also have to be able to write and produce and direct these other little short things, which is not the job of a writer.
Craig: I’ll tell you the kind of script that doesn’t need a concept trailer, a good one. Because a good script is the proof of concept. If it’s good, it’ll work. Nobody has ever read a really good script and gone, “Oh my God, this is great,” but I need a proof-of-concept.
John: Here’s the question. The reason why the proof-of-concept trailers happen is because it’s to get you to read the script. That, I think, is a valid thing, and there are examples of people who’ve done it.
Craig: If anybody refuses to read a script unless they see a proof-of-concept trailer–
John: They’re not refusing to read it. They’re not interested in reading it.
Craig: Then who are those people?
John: They are people who value their reading time. They’re not going to read a thing until they see a thing. They would rather spend Lights Out, which is the little short that I mentioned before. It’s basically a proof-of-concept thing. It’s like a 90-second thing. People spend 90 seconds to do a thing.
Craig: Yes. If you have a high concept, it can be–
John: That’s the reason why I think you do it.
Craig: I still think that our business largely runs on people reading.
John: Yes, it does.
Craig: Part of what happens here is everybody is desperate to exert control over the process. There is no control over the process. The only way you can truly exert control over the process is by writing something undeniably good. That’s it.
John: We’re not in disagreement there. I do think that in certain genres and for really high-concept ideas, a trailer, a short film could be a good way to pique interest in it.
Craig: Spend as little money as possible.
John: Or you do a thing where you make a short that actually is good in and of itself. That goes to festivals-
Craig: That’s different.
John: -and people say, “Oh, well, this is a good short, and I would love to see the feature version of that.”
Craig: That’s the Whiplash method, and that’s fine. You can absolutely make a short film that you then are like, “Look, I have a feature version of this. That is, in and of itself, a whole thing, but just for a script that is good? Just like, hey, read the first five pages. There’s my little teaser.
John: Let’s answer our listener question from Martin. He’s writing about staff writers’ salaries.
Megana: Martin asks, “We now have TV shows like Severance and Shogun that might yield one season of output over a three-year period. Presumably, the writers are working on that material the entire time. Are the salaries for the writers on those shows structured in such a way that it is a living/desirable wage for a person in this industry at that level? Are those people forced to find other work while they work on their eight scripts over a three-year period?”
John: Martin has a presumption there that is not actually correct. Presumably, the writers are working on material that entire time. That’s not how these shows work. Writers on shows like Severance or Shogun are hired for a writer’s room, a writing period. Maybe it’s 20 weeks, maybe it’s longer than that. On shows like this, they’re basically getting all the scripts written ahead of time. Those writers go away, and then it’s left to the showrunners and maybe another producer to stay on board to actually make the rest of the shows.
We’ve had many showrunners come on the show talking about how it’s a real struggle to get the studio to pay for it. I need another writer on set to help me out here. Ms. Hannah has talked about that.
Craig: Which I think we now have mandated to some amount. The last strike, in no small part, was about addressing some of these issues because it had become an enormous problem, particularly in the case of what they call mini rooms, which is a really bad name for what it is. It’s not descriptive, but pre-green light rooms where writers were not being paid, or they were being paid for a week, but then they would be held exclusive for these long stretches of time where they couldn’t do anything else. Then the show wouldn’t go.
We’ve done quite a bit of work on the union side to address some of those things. John’s right. There is some fundamental misunderstandings here. Why does Severance take three years? Because they shoot slowly. Production is the longest phase. That’s the same for me and my show. That’s the same for Justin and his show. That’s just how it goes. Because I write and Justin writes and Dan Erickson writes, the primary writer is there constantly going while the show is being shot.
Yes, you don’t hold a full-size room throughout the course of production. Nobody does that because of the way these shows are made. It used to be that you would because shows were made so quickly. There are still shows that function like that.
John: Yes, Tracker on CBS.
Craig: Sure. Tracker on CBS. That is–
John: It’s a big room that’s constantly writing, and they’re writing as they’re shooting.
Craig: Because they’re making 22 episodes a season, because their production is about, I’m going to guess, 8 days an episode, maybe 9. For a show like Severance, their production is probably between 20 and 30 days an episode, sometimes maybe even more. Same goes for me. Same goes for Shogun. That’s how that functions. Because of that, no. That’s why it takes so long in between these shows, because of the scale of them or just the nature of how they go. For those shows, no.
John: Overall, I’d say Martin’s instinct was right. It feels like it would be a problem. How would you possibly make it work? It was a problem, and so we had to address it.
Craig: We definitely fixed some things. The good news here is that writers who work on these shows for, let’s say, 20 weeks, when they’re done, they go work on another show, hopefully, for another 20 weeks. They’re not held. Basically, it’s not like they work on a show for 20 weeks, and then they have to wait until that show has finished production for them to go and do another job.
John: Megana, you had this experience firsthand because you worked on a show for a writer’s room for a time, and then while that show was still shooting, you were off on another show.
Megana: Right. Yes. To get back to Martin’s question, though, about whether this is structured in a way that’s like a living desirable wage, I would still say no.
John: Because the real challenge, if you’re constantly hopping from show to show to show, it’s hard to piece together enough work over the course of a year to do it. It’s better than it was before, where people were being held on things and they couldn’t actually pursue other work, but it’s still really challenging.
Megana: Also, in our industry, you give 25% to your reps, your lawyers, and California taxes, et cetera, et cetera. I think for a lot of people in this industry, they are going a couple of years without finding work. To answer your second question, I think you are forced to find other sources of income.
Craig: Yes. The availability of work is the problem. If you could fill 50 weeks of the year, you would make a living wage.
John: If you could fill 40 weeks of the year, you would probably make a living wage.
Megana: 20 weeks.
Craig: Or 20. Finding those jobs is hard because there are not a lot of them.
John: There are many fewer than there were a few years ago.
Craig: Therefore, the competition for them is more intense. Therefore, people who have more experience are now competing for the same jobs that rookies are competing for. That squeeze is the problem that our membership faces. What the Writers’ Guild can do is negotiate how much you get paid a week if you’re getting paid, and how many weeks at a minimum you’re going to be paid for. Beyond that, what they can’t do is help you get a job. When the industry contracts and the jobs contract, then it becomes brutal.
I’ve heard nothing good from folks out there. Look, I’m happy that I was able to employ people. I think we employed them for 20 weeks. We’re just a show. You know what may be a good sign, actually? Let’s think about something positive for a moment. The Pitt won the Emmy for Best Drama, which I thought was fantastic. The Pitt is a new thing. It is halfway between the old model and the new model. Therefore, it is the new model, which is we’re going to do 15 episodes. We’re not doing 6 to 10. We’re also not doing 22. We’re doing 15.
That means we do need more writers, and it is going to run longer. Okay, I don’t think anybody’s thinking that we’re going to be able to fill all the network schedules with Dick Wolf shows that run 22 episodes a season, but this new model may catch on.
John: Yes, and are shot here in Los Angeles.
Craig: Well, that’s the most wonderful thing. That’s a whole other discussion, though.
John: Let’s take one last question. This is from Lawant about URLs.
Megana: Lawant writes, “This feels like a very basic and answerable question. How does film and TV production deal with fictional URLs? I’m currently co-writing a movie about hacking that has a significant amount of screen time dedicated to what’s happening on computer monitors, which includes hacking over the internet. Are we liable if we use URLs that either someone else or nobody owns? As in, while we’re not showing anything illegal on those sites, could a company that owns a URL we show give us trouble? Is there an equivalent to the 555 phone numbers used on TV?”
John: In most cases, Lawant, you’re actually just registering the URL. You’re picking things that aren’t being used for other things, and you’re just actually getting them yourself. I own a bunch of URLs for things I need to do for projects, including Arlo Finch stuff, and it’s $10 a year or whatever. I just hold onto a bunch of these, and I suspect that’s what the legal counsel will ask you to do on any show.
Craig: This is a not problem. You don’t even have to spend the $10. I would say, hey, don’t use a URL that exists because, yes, it could be an issue. You just put whatever you want in there. You can always go www3 dot, dah, da, dah. Throw another symbol in there or whatever, just to change it up. Ultimately, that’s the production’s issue. They’ll make sure that they find things that are clearable and ownable and controllable. They can even use those things as Easter egg sites for people that want to dive in. This is not an issue.
John: Time for one cool thing. My one cool thing is called Maccy. It is a clipboard manager for your Mac. It is free. You should download it and install it. Craig, I don’t know if you use a clipboard manager.
Craig: I’ve tried so many times.
John: Once you get used to it, basically, a clipboard manager means when you copy something and paste it just holds onto everything that you’ve copied. You can go back like, “Oh, that’s the thing I needed.” It’s because so often you need to copy and paste two things, and rather than go back and forth, you just do that.
Craig: I think I said one of these years ago on the show. It was one cool thing. I just can’t find one that just–
John: This is the one you should use.
Craig: It’s called Maccy.
John: Maccy, M-A-C-C-Y.
Craig: For a MacBook.
John: It’s only for Mac.
Craig: Got it. M-A-C-C-Y.
John: Basically, Command-V is paste, Shift-Command-V or whatever else you want is open this, and just puts up a list of all the recent things in your clipboard. You can paste those in. That’s what it looks like.
Megana: This is incredible.
John: It’s so useful. The reason I’m mentioning it today is I updated my system software, and suddenly my clipboard manager wasn’t working on it. I had no idea what the name of the app was that I was actually using. It’s just been so invisible. There, it just feels like my computer’s broken if I don’t have this installed.
Craig: Okay, Maccy. That is now my one cool thing because if that works–
John: It is free and open source.
Craig: If this works–
John: You will be amazed at how much more productive you are.
Craig: I’m emailing myself to get Maccy. This is good. I’m doing it. I’m using that. That’s it. I’m stealing it.
John: That’s your one cool thing.
Craig: That’s my money. It’s cooler than anything I can think of. That’s awesome.
John: Do you have one cool thing you want to share with us?
Megana: Sure. I watched this documentary on Devo last night on Netflix. I would highly recommend it. It is a little bit depressing because it’s about this group of artists who didn’t quite get their message across. I found it uplifting in that it reminded me that artists have always struggled against the US government. This is not the first time. This is not the last. If you’re trying to do something new and inventive, it will probably be misunderstood, and you won’t find commercial success.
John: What was the name of the documentary again?
Megana: I think it’s just called Devo.
John: Devo. Just the band?
Megana: Yes. Are you familiar with Devo?
John: I know what they are. I can’t say I’m a fan, but I recognize them as being–
Craig: There are some fans of Devo. Maybe because of my age, I was just a little young.
John: Yes, same.
Craig: I never quite understood what the hell was going on there. Although, like everybody our age, I assume you went to a roller skate birthday party and you heard Whip It. Whip It, real good.
Megana: I would recommend this documentary. It’s really good.
John: All right. I’ll check it out.
Megana: I’ve always been a Devo fan because they’re little art freaks from Ohio.
John: Yes. Good stuff.
Craig: You must whip it.
John: Awesome.
Craig: You must whip it.
John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced this week by Megana Rao, normally by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week is by Luke Davis. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with our sign-up for a weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow.
You will also find us on Instagram @Scriptnotes Podcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and drinkware. You can find all those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you, premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do things like transcripts where we can go back and look at what did we actually say in 2018.
Craig: What did we say?
John: What did we say? We have transcripts all the way back to episode one. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net where you get all those backup episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on intermission. Megana, thanks again for producing today.
Megana: Thank you guys for having me on.
Craig: Legend.
Megana: The Banshee.
Craig: The Banshee.
[Bonus Segment]
John: All right, intermissions. We were driving back from the Jimmy Kimmel protest yesterday, and we were thinking about what is the bonus topic going to be? We went through a lot of different options. I think because we’re both excited to see the new Paula Thomas Anderson movie, which is three hours long without an intermission, we thought we should talk about intermissions and intermissions as a concept for movies, but also for stage productions.
Craig: I love them.
John: Yes, I like them too.
Craig: I love an intermission. An intermission, first and foremost, lets you pee. That’s huge. Everybody gets in that place where they’re like, “Okay, I got to pee. I am trying to suss out if I am just hitting the right three-minute moment to run out, pee, run back in.
John: Mike, for a long movie, he’ll go to the site that tells you where you should pee. For the Marvel movies, especially, it’ll tell you this is when to run out.
Craig: I think you run at any point. No offense to Marvel movies, but you know.
John: You don’t want to miss the cool big moment.
Craig: I think you’re going to run out at the end. You don’t run to pee during the climactic action. I love an intermission for that reason. I also think for certain movies, you need an intermission to just, woo, because–
John: I thought The Brutalist’s intermission was very smartly done. Also, it’s like the movie really is in two parts. You’re introducing a new major character after the intermission.
Craig: It lets you restart, which, as we’ve talked about, beginnings are great. It gives you a place to have a little bit of an ending. My first intermission, the one that is seared into my brain, was when I saw Gandhi. I was a kid, and I’d never been to a movie that was– I don’t know how long Gandhi was. Gandhi, like three and a half hours long or something. I got to that intermission, and I was just like, I need this moment to just breathe and go, “Whoa.” Then go back in. I was so excited to go back in.
It was like it was a chance to just get ready for more. Because there is also, there’s only so much your brain can handle without just taking a little bit of a break. That’s why I love a musical where the curtain comes down. It gives you a chance to drive everybody excited and give them a chance to go pee and talk amongst themselves, and then get back into it.
John: I’m a fan of intermissions, but having now gone through Big Fish, the musical, doing a version that’s one act, it is so interesting to look at how the form of the intermission breaks musicals and forces patterns that are maybe not natural. In the two-act version of Big Fish, I love it, but we have to get up to this moment where the end of act one, it has to be a big song, a big moment, a big decision point that’s setting up for, “Oh, you want to come back after the intermission to see what pays off.” It is an artificial construct to do it.
It can’t just stop. It has to really start. Then you have to come into the second act with, there’s an expectation of size and scope and welcome back to the thing. Cutting those moments out of this one-act version, it’s like, oh, there’s sustained tension about the question the entire time through. That is a nice difference. I like both versions of it, but it’s just, you notice how much you are forcing things into a specific pattern when you have to have the intermission.
Megana: We were talking about this yesterday where you were saying The Brutalist is designed to have an intermission because it’s two distinct parts. Aren’t most movies, like you are working towards a midpoint where there’s going to be some sort of reversal or–
John: I also feel like the midpoint is a construct that was created by, I don’t know if it’s Sid Fields specifically, but I don’t think midpoints are really a thing the way that act rates are a thing.
Craig: Yes. They’re rarely divided in the middle. On Broadway, the first act is always longer than the second act.
John: For a theatrical film, the classic paradigm is that the first 30 pages is your first act and there’s not a cadence anymore. Then the next 60 pages are the second act, and the last 30 pages are the third act. Sure, sort of. It feels nice and symmetrical to say that at 60, there’s some sort of midpoint turn. I don’t find that in the movies I’ve written or most movies I’ve seen, I can really point out what that is.
Craig: No. In my How to Write a Movie 1, talk about it like how in the middle of a movie, generally, a character starts to realize they can’t go back, but they’re afraid of going forward. That’s not like a big plot thing necessarily.
Megana: Something you could have an intermission around.
Craig: Right. I don’t recall what scene was the last scene of the first part of Gandhi, but in my sense memory, it wasn’t designed for an intermission. It was sort of like, “We need an intermission, where can we put it?” “Here.” Which I was fine with.
John: It’s also worth thinking about, there were probably actual mechanical things they needed to think about. We saw Gandhi on film. Film was shipping on these giant reels. At a certain point, they literally needed to switch over what’s happening, or they needed to cut things together onto bigger plates. I just went and saw an old Hitchcock movie, Suspicion, over at Tarantino’s Theater. You realize, “Oh, that’s right.” We used to have to change reels. We used to have to do all these different things. An intermission is actually a chance to do physical things that needed to happen with film that aren’t necessary anymore.
Craig: They have. Obviously, you have the whole alternating reel thing, but it may also– I don’t know. I don’t know how did projectors need a moment to cool off or with the bulb burnout. I don’t know.
John: In the business model, they wanted people to go buy concessions, too.
Craig: That’s the other thing. If you run a movie that’s 3 and a half hours long, that movie costs the same as a movie that costs 90 minutes. That’s a problem for you as a theater owner. You’re absolutely right. You’re giving people a chance to go buy some more stuff because they don’t want films that long. It helps the exhibitors accept the film.
John: Notably, we have very long movies that don’t have intermission. A lot of James Cameron movies are very long and don’t have intermissions. They could be designed for it. You can imagine a version of Titanic that includes intermission.
Craig: Oh, absolutely. I think intermissions are dramatic. I think intermissions say, you are at the theater. This is special.
John: The other nice thing about an intermission is the filmmaker is making a decision about, this is the right moment to get up and leave, to go to the bathroom, to have a conversation, to do something else. When you’re watching a movie at home, you can just pause it at any point and do those things. You don’t know if this is a good moment to do it. If you knew that there was going to be a natural spot in there, you might do it better. TV has always been written for act breaks for that reason. You write up to the act breaks and they’re artificial, but they–
Craig: Commercials were 12 intermissions on a show.
Megana: There used to always be intermissions in India. I think for Western movies I saw in India, it would just be wherever they wanted to put it.
John: Talk to us about seeing Indian movies in India. How long is the total experience? Is there just one intermission? Is there going to be multiple intermissions? How would it work?
Megana: Yes. It used to seem like Bollywood movies were so long, but now most Hollywood movies are the same length. I would say two and a half, three hours. Watching a movie in an Indian theater is the most fun you’ll ever have. People are dancing and singing, and they’re in the aisles. You have a 15-minute intermission. It makes the experience an event. You go out and get snacks. There’s always such good food at Indian movie theaters. Then you can use the restroom and come back. Usually in Bollywood movies, the second half of the movie is the very sad, melodramatic part. That’s when you come back, and then you start crying.
John: The films you’re describing, they are written with an intermission. It’s not just that we’re stopping at a random place. You feel like they’re actually structured to have an intermission.
Megana: They are written with an intermission. What is that Jennifer Lopez movie with the snake?
Craig: Oh, Anaconda?
John: Anaconda, yes.
Megana: Anaconda, yes. I remember seeing Anaconda in theaters in India.
Craig: They just threw one in there?
Megana: Yes.
Craig: How long was Anaconda?
John: No, Anaconda is probably a 90-minute movie.
Megana: Yes, but it’s good for you to go get a snack and talk about things.
Craig: Listen, everybody needs a snack. I looked up, so–
Megana: I can’t believe I forgot Anaconda.
John: Yes. There’s a new Anaconda coming. I’m very excited for the new Anaconda. The trailer looks very, very funny.
Craig: 1982, Gandhi’s intermission was at the 1-hour and 31-minute mark.
John: That feels right.
Craig: It was followed by a three-minute musical interlude over a black screen before the second part of the film began. Basically, go pee, come back. However, this intermission was omitted for most subsequent releases. It was special. It was special.
John: I remember in the start of the program, we had to talk about plans for a re-release of a classic film. I chose Gone with the Wind. My proposal was rather than split it with the intermission, you should actually make it Gone with the Wind Part I and Gone with the Wind Part II.
Craig: Like two different nights?
John: Two different nights.
Craig: Sure.
Megana: More ticket sales.
John: Do it. Absolutely.
Craig: More ticket sales. Listen, we’re show people. We’re carnival barkers. Anything that works. Anything that works.
John: Including the intermission.
Craig: Including throwing an intermission into Anaconda.
[laughter]
John: Now for our intermission. Thank you, Craig. Thank you, Megana.
Megana: Thank you both.
Craig: Thanks, guys.
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